Rotman School Research on Pension Plans Honoured by the Toronto CFA Society
Toronto, March 5, 2012 – A research paper by two professors at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management was honoured last week with the 2011 Canadian Investment Research Award presented by the Toronto CFA Society and Hillsdale Investment Management. The paper, "Is Bigger Better? Size and Performance in Pension Plan Management," was co-written by Profs. Alexander Dyck and Lukasz Pomorski, with the support of the Rotman International Centre for Pension Management.
The Toronto CFA Society and Hillsdale Canadian Investment Research Award is open to global researchers conducting research related to Canadian capital markets, including both academics (professors and students) and practitioners. The winning research paper, received a $10,000 prize.
Profs. Dyck and Pomorski used CEM Benchmarking data covering more than 800 global defined benefit pension plans to assess the impact of size on a pension plan's performance. "Larger DB plans earn better returns across the board, but the advantage of size appears to be more pronounced in plans with strong governance practices," said Prof. Pomorski. "Most of the outperformance is driven by cost savings arising from in-house investment capabilities and superior returns achieved by investing in alternatives to stocks and bonds," he said. The researchers concluded that "bigger is better when it comes to pension plans.” Read a full press release on the paper from September 2011 here.
Alexander Dyck holds the ICPM Professorship of Pension Management and is a professor of finance and business economics at the Rotman School. Previously, he was an assistant professor at Harvard Business School and holds a PhD from Stanford University. Lukasz Pomorski is an assistant professor of finance at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management. He received a PhD in Finance and an MBA from the University of Chicago, and his award-winning research has been covered in The Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post.
Other faculty from the Rotman School, which is CFA Program Partner, have been honoured recently by the CFA Institute. Keith Ambachtsheer, the director of the Rotman International Centre for Pension Management received the CFA Institute’s Award for Professional Excellence in 2011. In the same year, an article by Profs. John Hull and Alan White on the “The Risk of Tranches Created from Mortgages” received a Graham and Dodd Scroll Award for an outstanding article from the CFA Institute’s Financial Analysts Journal (FAJ) Advisory Council and Editorial Board.
The Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto is redesigning business education for the 21st century with a curriculum based on Integrative Thinking. Located in the world’s most diverse city, the Rotman School fosters a new way to think that enables the design of creative business solutions. The School is currently raising $200 million to ensure Canada has the world-class business school it deserves. For more information, visit www.rotman.utoronto.ca . Ken McGuffin
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Rotman School of Management
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