Pension Funds and Sustainable Investment

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Since its green shoots first emerged around 50 years ago, acceptance of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) considerations in institutional investing-especially at pension funds-has evolved with distinct shifts in investor preferences. This Pension Research Council volume traces these shifts and their implications, leading up to the present day. The book notes that investors have diverse reasons for devoting attention to ESG criteria when deciding where to invest their money. Some had religious motives, such as Quakers who focused on values; this approach can offer some risk mitigation. Nevertheless, studies that look at whether divestment actually changes companies' behaviors show that this rarely occurs. Accordingly, this book offers a variety of distinct viewpoints from a variety of countries, on whether, how, and when ESG criteria should, and should not, drive pension fund investments. The authors also find that policymakers should consider fund consolidation in private sector retirement systems, along with whether service-provider incentives could be better be aligned with sustainability incentives. For instance, boosting transparency in these markets would help generate better-informed policies, while providing beneficiaries with information relevant to their savings choices.

Brett Hammond is a research leader at the American Funds of the Capital Group; he is also Executive Vice President of the Q Group and member of the Pension Research Council's Advisory Board. Previously he directed research teams at MSCI, and he served as chief investment strategist at TIAA-CREF while working on the creation of target-date funds, inflation-linked bonds, and individual financial advice. He also served on the senior management team at The National Academies, responsible for behavioral and social sciences studies; he also taught at The Wharton School. His research focuses on investing, institutional and individual asset allocation, pensions, higher education, and public policy. He received his bachelor's degree in economics and political science from the University of California at Santa Cruz, and a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is currently editor-in-chief of the peer-reviewed Journal of Retirement. Raimond Maurer is Professor of Investment, Portfolio Management, and Pension Finance at the Finance Department of the Goethe University Frankfurt. His research focuses on asset management, lifetime portfolio choice, real estate, and pension finance. Previously he was in residence at the Wharton School as Visiting Professor, and he serves as Advisory Board member of the Pension Research Council. His other professional activities include serving on the Union Real Estate Investment group, the Society of Actuaries, and the Association of Certified International Investment Analysts. He recently completed a Deanship at the Faculty of Economics and Business of the Goethe University, where he currently serves on the Faculty Senate. His habilitation and dissertation were awarded by Mannheim University, and he also was awarded an honorary doctorate from the State University of Finance and Economics of St. Petersburg. Olivia S. Mitchell is the International Foundation of Employee Benefit Plans Professor, and Professor of Insurance/Risk Management and Business Economics/Policy; Executive Director of the Pension Research Council; and Director of the Boettner Center on Pensions and Retirement Research; all at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Concurrently Dr. Mitchell serves as a Research Associate at the NBER; Independent Director on the Wells Fargo Fund Boards; Co-Investigator for the Health and Retirement Study at the University of Michigan; and Executive Board Member for the Michigan Retirement Research Center. She also serves on the Academic Advisory Council for the Consumer Finance Institute at the Philadelphia Federal Reserve; the Advisory Committee of the HEC Montreal Retirement and Savings Institute; and the UNSW Centre for Pensions and Superannuation. She earned her B.A. in Economics from Harvard University, and her M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Economics from the University of Wisconsin.