Ian Tonks

University of Bristol | UB · School of Economics, Finance and Management

We propose a new methodology for the smart design of the default investment fund(s) in occupational defined contribution pension schemes based on the observable characteristics of scheme members. Using a unique dataset of member risk attitudes and characteristics from a survey of a large UK pension scheme, we apply factor analysis to identify singl...

We propose a new methodology for the smart design of the default investment fund(s) in occupational defined contribution pension schemes based on the observable characteristics of scheme members. Using a unique dataset of member risk attitudes and characteristics from a survey of a large UK pension scheme, we apply factor analysis to identify singl...

Cluster analysis is used to identify homogeneous groups of members of USS in terms of risk attitudes. There are two distinct clusters of members in their 40s and 50s. One had previously ‘engaged’ with USS by making additional voluntary contributions. It typically had higher pay, longer tenure, less interest in ethical investing, lower risk capacity...

In this paper, we analyse the number of default investment funds appropriate for an occupational defined contribution pension scheme. Using a unique dataset of member risk attitudes and characteristics from a survey of a large UK pension scheme, we apply cluster analysis to identify two distinct groups of members in their 40s and 50s. Further analy...

Cluster analysis is used to identify homogeneous groups of members of USS in terms of risk attitudes. There are two distinct clusters of members in their 40s and 50s. One had previously ‘engaged’ with USS by making additional voluntary contributions. It typically had higher pay, longer tenure, less interest in ethical investing, lower risk capacity...

Papers in this special issue focus on sustainable corporate governance measures in the aftermath of the financial crisis, and a background environment of increased scepticism over executive pay and corporate behaviour more generally. The authors provide an overview of recent corporate governance reforms, including ‘say‐on‐pay’ and gender‐pay‐gap tr...

We show a positive relation between network centrality and risk-adjusted performance in a delegated investment management setting. More connected managers take more portfolio risk and receive higher investor flows, consistent with these managers improving their ability to exploit investment opportunities through their network connections. Greater n...

We show that trades by corporate insiders after an earnings announcement determine in part the extent of the post-earnings announcement drift anomaly. Contrarian trades mitigate the under-reaction to earnings announcements, and confirmatory trades allow for price discovery with price movements continuing in the same direction of the earnings surpri...

We compare two bootstrap methods for assessing mutual fund performance. The first produces narrow confidence intervals due to pooling over time, whereas the second produces wider confidence intervals because it preserves the cross correlation of fund returns. We then show that the average U.K. equity mutual fund manager is unable to deliver outperf...

Most empirical studies suggest that mutual funds do not persistently outperform an appropriate benchmark in the long run. We analyze this lack of persistence in terms of two equilibrating mechanisms: fund flows and manager changes. Using data on actively managed U.S. equity mutual funds, we find that if neither mechanism is operating, winner funds...

We compare two bootstrap methods for assessing mutual fund performance. Kosowski, Timmermann, Wermers and White (2006) produces narrow confidence intervals due to pooling over time, while Fama and French (2010) produces wider confidence intervals because it preserves the cross-correlation of fund returns. We then show that the average UK equity mut...

This paper investigates the effect of recent regulatory changes to the compulsory annuitisation of tax-privileged pension savings, on the demand for annuities and other retirement products. We find that the demand for annuities has fallen by almost 75 per cent from its peak in 2012, and the demand for income drawdown products has increased. There i...

We show that tests for adverse selection in annuity markets using prices are not identified. Within the UK annuity market, different annuity products create the potential for a Rothschild-Stiglitz separating equilibrium as different risk types could choose different annuities. Empirical analyses using the "money's worth" suggest that prices are ind...

Central banks in advanced economies implemented quantitative easing (QE) as a response to the Global Crisis. A key transmission mechanism of QE, emphasised by policymakers, has been the ‘portfolio balance’ channel. This column describes behaviour of insurance companies and pension funds using sectoral and micro-level data from the UK. The results s...

We analyze the relation between the location of a pension fund in its network and the investment performance, risk taking, and flows of the fund. Our approach analyzes the centrality of the fund's management company by examining the number of connections it has with other management companies through their commonality in managing for the same fund...

The past few decades have seen a major shift from centralized to decentralized investment management by pension fund sponsors, despite the increased coordination problems that this brings. Using a unique, proprietary dataset of pension sponsors and managers, we identify two secular decentralization trends: sponsors switched (i) from generalist (bal...

Two new methodologies are introduced to improve inference in the evaluation of mutual fund performance against benchmarks. First, the benchmark models are estimated using panel methods with both fund and time effects. Second, the non-normality of individual mutual fund returns is accounted for by using panel bootstrap methods. We also augment the s...

Two new methodologies are introduced to improve inference in the evaluation of mutual fund performance against benchmarks. First, the benchmark models are estimated using panel methods with both fund and time effects. Second, the non-normality of individual mutual fund returns is accounted for by using panel bootstrap methods. We also augment the s...

The past few decades have seen a major shift from centralized to decentralized investment management by pension fund sponsors, despite the increased coordination problems that this brings. Using a unique, proprietary dataset of pension sponsors and managers, we identify two secular decentralization trends: sponsors switched (i) from generalist (bal...

We provide the first analysis of annuity rates in the Netherlands for the period 2001-2012. During this period, the number of annuity providers was high and stable and we find that falls in annuity rates can be explained entirely by changes in yields and life expectancy. We show that annuitants could have increased their annuity income by about 5%,...

The "money's worth" measure has been used to assess whether annuities are fairly valued and also as evidence for adverse selection in the annuity market. However, a regulated life assurer with concerns about predicting long-run mortality may price annuities to reduce these risks which will affect the money’s worth. We provide a simple model of the...

This paper examines the pay-performance relationship between executive cash compensation (including bonuses) and company performance for a sample of large UK companies, focusing particularly on the financial services industry, since incentive misalignment has been blamed as one of the factors causing the global financial crisis of 2007–2008. Althou...

Attitudes towards male and female managers within organizations are well documented, but how the stock market perceives their relative capabilities is less studied. Recent evidence documents a negative short-run market reaction to the appointment of female chief executive officers and suggests that female executives are less informed than their mal...

Using a unique data set, we document two secular trends in the shift from centralized to decentralized pension fund management over the past few decades. First, across asset classes, sponsors replace generalist balanced managers with better-performing specialists. Second, within asset classes, funds replace single managers with multiple competing m...

This study examines the patterns of, and long-run returns to, directors’ (insiders’) trades along the value-glamour continuum in all stocks listed on the main London Stock Exchange and analyses what these directors’ trades add to a naïve value-glamour strategy. We consider alternative definitions of ‘value’ in defining trades and in the constructio...

This chapter describes the operation of both the compulsory pension annuity and voluntary annuity markets in the United Kingdom, and evaluates prices using a money's worth approach. This chapter finds that the money's worth was about 0.90 in 2004 but it then fell to about 0.80, although there is uncertainty about the appropriate mortality table. Th...

This report ‘Ending compulsory annuitisation: Quantifying the consequences’ is intended to provide a quantitative assessment of the issues raised in our earlier report. ‘Ending compulsory annuitisation: What are the consequences?’ published in July 2010. We also provide policy recommendations in relation to the UK government's proposal to end compu...

The purpose of this report is very specific: to stimulate debate about the proposal by the UK government to end the mandatory requirement to purchase annuities in pension schemes as formally announced in the Budget Statement on 22 June 2010.

This paper investigates the reasons for the lack of long-term persistence in the investment performance of actively managed equity mutual funds. We document that the responses of investors, fund managers, and investment management companies to past performance affect future performance. Conditioning on fund flows and manager changes allows us to pr...

Working paper This paper examines the effect of a company’s pension contributions on its dividend and investment policies. Using a sample of all FTSE350 UK listed firms with at least one defined benefit pension scheme from 2001 to 2004, we find a strong and negative relation between pension contributions and corporate dividend payments even after c...

Working paper This paper describes the operation of both the compulsory pension annuity and voluntary annuity markets in the UK. The paper reports on the movement of UK annuity price quotes in the voluntary market from 1957-2009, and in the pension annuity market from 1994 to 2009, and examines whether annuities were fairly priced over this period....

This paper estimates the risks of financial distress in UK universities, and uses these estimates to examine the basis of the annual levies paid to the UK's Pension Protection Fund by the Universities Superannuation Scheme, a multi-employer scheme covering 391 universities and related institutions. The paper compares the payments between the two al...

We use historical data on investment returns and labor income from 16 countries to quantify the value and risk of defined contribution pension plans, building frequency distributions of pension fund and pension replacement ratios for each country. We show that pension risk is substantial and find that pension fund ratios are lower and less variable...

Wotking paper This paper examines the effect of a company’s unfunded pension liabilities on its stock market valuation. Using a sample of UK FTSE350 firms with defined benefit pension schemes, we find that although unfunded pension liabilities reduce the market value of the firm, the coefficient estimates indicate a less than one-for-one effect. Mo...

Abstract This paper uses a proprietary dataset to study two key shifts in the structure of the UK pension fund industry from 1984 to 2004. Specifically, most pension fund sponsors shifted from balanced managers,(those managing,across all asset classes) to specialist managers,(those spe- cializing within a single asset class), and from a single mana...

The objective of this research is to jointly investigate the impact that fund flows and manager turnover have on the investment performance of actively managed equity mutual funds. Both fund flows and manager turnover have been identified in the literature as relevant factors that significantly affect performance persistence. We analyze which of th...

The Pension Crisis concerns the changing demographic profile of the economy: an increasing number of elderly persons supported by fewer young people. Governments around the world are responding to this impending crisis by shifting their pension policies away from pay-as-you-go systems towards individual savings schemes. These savings need to be con...

Working paper This study examines the patterns of, and the long run returns to, directors’ trades along the value/glamour continuum. We find that directors consistently trade in what appears to be a contrarian fashion, buying more “value” stocks and selling more “glamour” stocks, and also buying following price falls and selling following price ris...

Working paper; first version September 2007; this version July 2009 We examine whether directors of UK companies can time the market when they trade in their own-company stock, using a comprehensive dataset on all directors’ trades from 1994-2006 for FTSE All Share companies and AIM-listed companies. We find that in the 20 days before a director’s...

We document that the observed persistence amongst the worst performing actively managed mutual funds is attributable to funds that have performed poorly both in the current and prior year. We demonstrate that this persistence results from an unwillingness of investors in these funds to respond to bad performance by withdrawing their capital. In con...

The purpose of this article is to analyse the investment-management process of funds invested in pension schemes. It focuses particularly on measuring the performance of investment returns earned by pension funds. Although investment performance is considered within a global context, in fact only a small number of countries have sizeable funded pen...

This paper examines the relationship between executive cash compensation and company performance for a sample of large UK companies over the period 1994-2002. This relationship is examined against a background of a series of reports into corporate governance mechanisms in UK companies. We show that base pay compensation of UK executives has increas...

Previous work on U.K. pension funds found only slight evidence of fund manager persistence but survivorship bias in the construction of these data samples may have disguised true persistence. Using a large sample of pension funds over the period 198397 in which there is less survivorship bias, we find strong evidence of persistence in abnormal retu...

Various markets, particularly NASDAQ, have been under pressure from regulators and market participants to introduce call auctions for their opening and closing periods. We investigate the performance of call markets at the open and close from a unique natural experiment provided by the institutional structure of the London Stock Exchange. As well a...

Previous work examined the long-run profitability of strategies mimicking the trades of company directors in the shares of their own company. However, the evidence regarding returns during the month containing the insider trade was ambiguous. The current paper examines the patterns of security returns in the days around the trades of corporate insi...

This paper constructs a time series of annuity rates in the U.K. for 1957-2002, and examines the pricing of U.K. annuities, and the relationship between the accumulation and decumulation phases of a defined contribution pension scheme by focusing on the properties of the pension replacement ratio. The paper computes the money's worth of annuities o...

This paper examines the performance of personal pensions (exempt unit trusts) in the UK 1980-2000. Unitised personal pension schemes are a type of mutual fund that is constituted as a contractual savings scheme, whose value can only be accessed at retirement. By studying the performance of these schemes we are able to assess the role of illiquidity...

The UK annuity market is one of the largest in the world and of considerable importance for research on pensions, and understanding the decumulation phase in defined-contribution pension schemes. Time-series data for UK annuity rates has hitherto been unavailable. This article presents data for the period 1957 to 2002 and describes how the data wer...

This paper compares the trading costs for institutional investors who are subject to liquidity shocks, of trading in auction and dealer markets. The batch auction restricts the institutions' ability to exploit informational advantages because of competition between institutions when they simultaneously submit their orders. This competition lowers a...

Various markets, particularly NASDAQ, have been under pressure from regulators and market participants to introduce call auctions for their open-ing and closing periods. We investigate the performance of call markets at the open and close from a unique natural experiment provided by the insti-tutional structure of the London Stock Exchange. As well...

This paper compares trading costs for institutional investors subject to liquidity shocks, in auction and dealer markets. The batch auction restricts the institutions' ability to exploit informational advantages because of competition between institutions when they simultaneously submit orders. This competition lowers aggregate trading costs. In th...

This paper investigates the presence of abnormal returns through the use of trading strategies that exploit the predictability of short run stock price movements. Based on historical returns of the largest set of individual securities in the UK stock market examined to date, this paper identifies profitable momentum trading strategies as investment...

This paper constructs a time series of annuity rates in the UK for 1957-2002, and examines the pricing of UK annuities, and the relationship between the accumulation and decumulation phases of a defined contribution pension scheme by focusing on the properties of the pension replacement ratio. Using data on annuity returns and the returns on other...

Assessing the investment performance of pension funds is important since a number of recent UK policy documents have argued that pension contributions in particular should be investing in tracker funds, on the basis that there is little evidence that active fund management can deliver superior investment returns for the consumer. This chapter exami...

This paper examines the determinants of bid-ask spreads and their behaviour around corporate earning announcement dates, for a sample of UK firms over the period 1986-94. The paper finds that closing daily spreads are affected by order processing costs (proxied by trading volumes), inventory control costs (trading volumes and return variability) an...

was funded by the ESRC “Understanding the Evolving Macroeconomy ” Programme under grant L138 25 1031. We should like to thank Becca Fell and Sally Lane for Although pensions are not usually considered the most interesting of topics, there has been considerable discussion in the British press (e.g., The Sun, 5 March 2002, The Observer, February 17,...

This paper assesses the impact of the UK Financial Reporting Standard 3 (FRS3) “Reporting Financial Performance” on the ability of analysts to predict companies’ future earnings per share. FRS3 requires companies to publish a wider information set than before, to help users to appraise current performance and to form an opinion of future levels of...

Previous work examined the long-run profitability of strategies mimicking the trades company directors in the shares of their own company, as a way of testing for market efficiency. The current paper examines patterns in abnormal returns in the days around these trades on the London Stock Exchange. We find movements in returns that are consistent w...

This paper investigates the presence of abnormal returns through the use of trading strategies that exploit the predictability of short run stock price movements. Based on historical returns of the largest set of individual securities in the UK stock market examined to date, this paper identifies profitable momentum trading strategies as investment...