Here’s your top stories:
- Nigeria perseveres with new SWF.
- The Russia Direct Investment Fund is teaming with Cartesian Capital to invest $160 million in the Moscow Exchange.
- The Korea Investment Corporation likes Chinese equities.
- The Alberta Investment Management Corporation agrees to help finance the new BBC Television Centre.
- Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan buys Goals Soccer.
- Here are some interesting details on the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board‘s buyout of Suddenlink.
- China’s National Council for Social Security Fund has selected a bunch of new asset managers.
- Temasek is selling $1.7 billion in bonds.
- Spain’s dwindling Pension Reserve Fund has moved nearly all of its assets into Spanish debt.
- China and Africa deepen economic ties with $20 billion in loans over coming three years.
- Canada’s PSP Investments returned 3% for fiscal year 2012.
And here are some interesting papers for your weekend:
- Nancy Mohan and Ting Zhang have a new paper entitled “An Analysis of Risk-Taking Behavior for Public Defined Benefit Pension Plan”. Here’s a teaser:
“Unlike private pension plans, public funds undertake more risk if they are underfunded and have lower investment returns in the previous years, consistent with the risk transfer hypothesis. Furthermore, pension funds in states facing financial constraints allocate more assets to equity and have higher pension asset betas. There also appears to be a herding effect in that a change in CalPERS portfolio beta or equity allocation is mimicked by other pension funds. Finally, the results offer mild support of a public union effect.”
- Next, Pablo Souto and Alberto R. Musalem have a new paper entitled “Assessing the Governance and Transparency of National Public Pension Funds”. Here’s a blurb:
“We develop and calculate a Transparency and Governance Index that measures compliance of NPPFs with best practices. Our results indicate a wide dispersion in governance and transparency performance of these funds, and provide the basic elements that governments should take into account when reforming NPPFs’ governance structures.”
Have a nice weekend!
