IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/cup/jpenef/v8y2009i04p501-525_00.html

Prudent investors: the asset allocation of public pension plans

Author

Listed:
  • WELLER, CHRISTIAN E.
  • WENGER, JEFFREY B.

Abstract

After 2000, the vast majority of defined benefit (DB) pension plans encountered a decrease in their funding ratios, largely due to a drop in asset prices. It is possible that public sector pension plans may have acted imprudently by chasing returns, once they encountered underfunding. We identify four indicators for DB plans' imprudent investment behavior: no portfolio rebalancing, employer conflicts of interest, trustee conflicts of interest, and failure to implement best investment practices. To see if public sector pension plans rebalance their portfolios, we use data from the Federal Reserve's Flow of Funds, dating from 1952 to 2007. To test for the remaining three hypotheses, we use data from the Census' State and Local Government Employee Retirement Systems data base, where consistent data for state and local government plans are available from 1993 to 2005. Our results suggest that there is no evidence that public sector plans systematically engaged in imprudent investment behavior and that this did not systematically differ after 2000 from the earlier period.

Suggested Citation

  • Weller, Christian E. & Wenger, Jeffrey B., 2009. "Prudent investors: the asset allocation of public pension plans," Journal of Pension Economics and Finance, Cambridge University Press, vol. 8(4), pages 501-525, October.
    • Handle: RePEc:cup:jpenef:v:8:y:2009:i:04:p:501-525_00
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S147474720800396X/type/journal_article
    File Function: link to article abstract page
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Mohan, Nancy & Zhang, Ting, 2014. "An analysis of risk-taking behavior for public defined benefit pension plans," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 40(C), pages 403-419.
    2. Hasa, Sidita & Salva, Carolina, 2024. "Cash holdings in pension funds," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 161(C).
    3. Milonas, Nikolaos /T & Papachristou, George & Roupas, Theodor /A, 2010. "Pension Funds under Investments Constraints: An Assessment of the Opportunity Cost to the Greek Social Security System," MPRA Paper 36702, University Library of Munich, Germany.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cup:jpenef:v:8:y:2009:i:04:p:501-525_00. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Kirk Stebbing (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.cambridge.org/pef .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.