Determinants of the fees paid by equity pension plans in Spain

Abstract

dimension of the funds as a means of social provision to provide contingency cover for retirement, survivorship, widowhood, orphanhood or disability, complementary to and not a substitute for cover from the public social security system, differentiates them from other sectors and has led to increased public interest in these funds. she held a position as an economist at the Valencia Stock Exchange and since then has focused her research on financial markets and published scientific papers in international journals. She is currently a faculty member in a number of master and postgraduate courses related to finance and financial markets. Outside the academic world she contributes actively with the NGO Economists Without Borders in sensitising and research projects and with the Observatory for Social Responsibility. AbstractThe main objective of this paper is to analyse the variables determining the fees incurred by pension plans. The study uses individualised data from the management and custodial fees for individual equity pension plans in Spain. The Spanish pension funds and pension plans market establishes maximum limits for both types of fee due to legal restrictions and the fact that its trade and management is mostly carried out by financial entities, which may in turn create a conflict of interests. The results show how the nature of the management company and the assets managed are relevant to the management fee. The influence of the number of participants in a pension plan on the custodial fee is of note.

The effect of a switch of management company on pension plan fees

“…Despite this level of concern, which gave rise to several decrees regulating pension plans, early research on the matter reported relatively high fee levels for Spanish individual pension plans (Devesa et al, 2002). This is possibly what motivated later research analysing the determinants of individual pension plan fees (Martí et al, 2006(Martí et al, , 2007(Martí et al, , 2009. Under Spanish legislation, however, individual and employer-sponsored pension plans 1 coexist, despite their considerable differences in terms of corporate governance, investor sophistication, switching costs and the bargaining power of the beneficiaries.…”