Concerned with excessive risk-taking, regulators worldwide generally prohibit performance-based fees in pension funds. Presumably, competition can substitute for incentive pay in providing incentives for fund managers to serve their clients’ interests. Using a regulatory experiment from Israel, we compare the performance of three exogenously-given long-term savings schemes: Funds with performance-based fees, facing no competition; funds with assetsunder-management (AUM)-based fees and virtually no competition; and funds with AUM-based fees, operating in a competitive environment. Funds with performance-based fees exhibit the highest risk-adjusted returns without assuming more risk. Competitive pressure is not associated with similar outcomes, suggesting that incentives and competition are not substitutes in the retirement savings industry.
Incentive Fees and Competition in Pension Funds: Evidence from a Regulatory Experiment Available to Purchase
This project was supported by the Israel Science Foundation (Grant No. 890/2013) and by the I-CORE program of the Planning and Budgeting Committee and the Israel Science Foundation (Grant No. 1821/12). Kandel and Yafeh received financial support from the Krueger Center at the Jerusalem School of Business Administration. We thank Doron Avramov, Mark Flannery, Michel Habib, Naomi Hausman, Petri Jylha, Beni Lauterbach, Lavi Schiffenbauer, Clemens Sialm, Michael Weisbach and seminar participants at the Bank of Finland, Bar Ilan University, the BI Business School (Oslo), Cass Business School (London), the Conference on Empirical Legal Studies in Europe (CELSE), the CEPR’s First Annual Symposium in Financial Economics (London), ESMT (Berlin), FIRS (Lisbon, 2016), the Hebrew University, Harvard Law School (the JLFA conference), London Business School, the NBER, the Saïd Business School (Oxford), the SEC, Tel Aviv University, Tilburg University, UC Berkeley and the University of Vienna for helpful comments and suggestions. We are also grateful to Ran Cohen, Izik Daniel, Assaf Hasson, Orry Kaz, Yaniv Makdoosi, Eyal Malka, Roma Poberejsky, Evyatar Sadeh, Noa Shukrun and Tomer Yafeh for outstanding research assistance.
Hamdani A, Kandel E, Mugerman Y, Yafeh Y (2017), "Incentive Fees and Competition in Pension Funds: Evidence from a Regulatory Experiment". Journal of Law, Finance and Accounting, Vol. 2 No. 1 pp. 49–86, doi: https://doi.org/10.1561/108.00000015
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