Using detailed stockholding for a comprehensive sample of Chinese mutual funds from 2004 to 2009, we investigate the economy of scale and liquidity on the relation between fund size and performance. We find that there exists an inverted U-shape relation between fund size and performance accounting for various performance benchmarks. Both economy of scale and liquidity exist and play an importan...

What motivates investors to hold American Depositary Receipts (ADRs) rather than the underlying stock of U.S. listed foreign firms? We analyze the investment allocation decision of actively-managed emerging market mutual fund managers. Although legal provisions are typically assumed to affect ADR and its underlying domestic shares equally, investors holding ADRs may have a higher level of legal...

The paper examines social security (public pension) reforms in which the programme is partially shifted from a public unfunded basis to a private, prefunded, basis. It focuses on reforms where individuals have a choice in switching from public funded to private unfunded programmes (as in the ‘contracting out’ scheme in the UK), or where some individuals are forced to join the funded scheme, or ...

We study how organizational complexity affects managerial behavior, breaking it down into vertical hierarchy and degree of specialization. We exploit a novel dataset on the organizational structure of the US asset management industry. We show that more hierarchical structures reduce the incentive to collect soft information by investing less in closely-located firms. This reduces portfolio conc...

In this paper we study the implications of population ageing in an economy with a sizeable non-traded goods sector. To this effect a highly stylized micro-founded macro model is constructed in which the age structure of the population plays a non-trivial role. The model distinguishes separate birth and death probabilities (thus allowing for net population change), allows for age-dependent labou...

Using a calibrated OLG model with several sources of uncertainty we find that the impact of ageing and of reform of social security upon the demand for housing and the level of owner occupation is substantial. The overall structure of household asset holdings in particular the split between real and financial assets is sensitive to demographics and to the generosity of state run, pay-as-yougo p...

The 1999 reforms to the Korea National Pension Scheme resulted in a unique situation, in which those who were insured by the pension scheme and those who were uninsured coexisted. Exploiting this situation, this paper evaluates the effect of public pension on private savings. The estimation results show that the average effect is close to zero. Households with low or very high saving rates were...

Is There a Social Security Tax Wedge? A Beveridgean pension scheme invariably introduces a wedge between the wage rate and the marginal take-home pay. A Bismarckian one can do so only if it is not actuarially fair, or in the presence of credit rationing. Interestingly, if the two possible sources of distortion are present at the same time, they will tend to offset each other. The distortion may...

This paper adopts a stochastic overlapping generations framework to analyze the allocation of aggregate financial risks under different social security systems and a majority voting rule. We study whether there will be switches between pay-as-you-go (PAYG) and fully funded (FF) systems in such an economy. We show that in case of a negative aggregate shock, lowincome young individuals will form ...

We provide a lifecycle framework for comparing the insurance value of disability benefits and the incentive cost. We estimate the risks that individuals face and the parameters governing the disability insurance program using longitudinal US data on consumption, health, disability insurance, and wages. We characterize the economic effects of disability insurance and study how policy reforms imp...