Investment Performance of Private Pension Funds in Selected Asian Countries: The Role of Fees and Management Companies

Abstract

This paper examines the investment performance of private pension funds in Hong Kong, South Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand, segregated by fund universe: Growth (equity), Moderate (balanced), and Conservative (bond) Fund. The adoption of hybrid model is a new attempt and all the three main categories of pension fund are evaluated in which previous studies have focused on merely equity funds. This study employs 6 years of monthly observations and a total of 931 pension-fund samples. Net returns and gross returns are used to evaluate the impact of fees on funds' performance with the hybrid model which mimics the Fama-French and Treynor-Mazuy. Empirical findings imply that most private pension funds in Asia have inferior performance even before the consideration of fees. In addition, the Growth Fund outperforms the Moderate and Conservative Fund before fees are taken into consideration. Nonetheless, management fees do deteriorate the performance of pension funds. Hence, policy makers should strive to devise suitable course of actions to raise the retirement incomes of citizen. Additionally, the results may be useful to investors to make better informed investment decisions and fund managers in building the pension fund's portfolio.