Pulling Back the Curtain on Public Pension Fund Performance

Abstract

Public pension funds report their rates of return and provide benchmark comparisons in their annual reports. There is evidence that reported performance is significantly biased in the funds’ favor by virtue of their use of laggard benchmarks. I propose an alternative approach to evaluating fund performance that provides unbiased results and has other advantages.

Keywords: Public Pension Funds, Investments, Alternative Investments, Private Equity, Investment Performance, Benchmarking, Alternatives