How Should Pension Funds Manage Risk?

Despite recent advances in risk management techniques, pension funds are still struggling with the concept of risk and with the practical challenges of managing and measuring it in useful ways. This article addresses this problem by showing that pension fund managers must manage two types of risk that affect a pension fund balance sheet's funded ratio. The most important of the two is asset policy risk, which arises from the choice of an asset mix policy that does not match the accrued pension liabilities. The other risk results from the decision to implement the chosen asset mix using active rather than passive management strategies. This article shows how both types of risk can be measured and managed through an adapted value at risk (VAR) metric: the funded ratio VAR. A study of the performance of 98 pension funds during the period 1992–1995 shows that the funds were adequately compensated, on average, for taking on the policy risk, but not for implementation risk.