7 research outputs found
Eliciting Pension Beneficiaries’ Sustainability Preferences: Why and How?
Full text linkWe explore whether beneficiaries of pension plans should have a voice in the fund’s sustainable investments. We hypothesize that the answer to this question depends on a fund’s legal and societal contexts, benchmarking pressure, and fund-specific factors such as the fund’s size and the board’s composition. We uncover heterogeneity in the degree to which beneficiaries are involved in decision-making. Some pension funds have started a dialogue with their participants, mainly using survey instruments. We provide an example of a fund that gave its participants a real vote, while avoiding the pitfalls that come with hypothetical surveys on individual preferences
Eliciting pension beneficiaries' sustainability preferences:Why and how?
No full textWe explore whether beneficiaries of pension plans should have a voice in their funds’ sustainable investments, and we hypothesize that the answer to this question depends on funds’ legal and societal contexts, benchmarking pressures, and fund-specific factors such as fund size and board composition. Only in a very limited number of funds do we find that the ultimate owners of the entrusted investments have direct involvement in decisions. Nevertheless, it is becoming increasingly clear that pension funds cannot simply ignore the many calls for action by substantial parts of their membership. In response, some pension funds have started a dialogue with their participants, mainly using survey instruments. We provide an example of a fund that gave its participants a real vote, while avoiding the pitfalls that come with hypothetical surveys on individual preferences
Pension Fund Asset Allocation and Liability Discount Rates
Full text linkThe unique regulation of U.S. public pension funds links their liability discount rate to the expected return on assets, which gives them incentives to invest more in risky assets in order to report a better funding status. Comparing public and private pension funds in the United States, Canada, and Europe, we find that U.S. public pension funds act on their regulatory incentives. U.S. public pension funds with a higher level of underfunding per participant, as well as funds with more politicians and elected plan participants serving on the board, take more risk and use higher discount rates. The increased risk-taking by U.S. public funds is negatively related to their performance
RECONCEPTUALIZING ECONOMIC REFLEXIVITYAS A CULTURAL POLITICS: THE CASE OF BOOK PUBLISHING IN CATALONIA, SPAIN
Full text linkAuthor Correction: Heritability estimates for 361 blood metabolites across 40 genome-wide association studies (Nature Communications, (2020), 11, 1, (39), 10.1038/s41467-019-13770-6)
No full textThe original version of the Supplementary Information associated with this Article included an incorrect Supplementary Data 1 file, in which additional delimiters were included in the first column for a number of rows, resulting in column shifts for some of these rows. The HTML has been updated to include a corrected version of Supplementary Data 1; the original incorrect version of Supplementary Data 1 can be found as Supplementary Information associated with this Correction. In addition, the original version of this Article contained an error in the author affiliations. An affiliation of Abdel Abdellaoui with Department of Psychiatry, Amsterdam UMC, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands was inadvertently omitted. This has now been corrected in both the PDF and HTML versions of the Article
Power, management and complexity in the NHS : a Foucauldian perspective
Full text linkThis thesis is a critical and post-structural exploration of the discourse of
managerialism in the NHS secondary care sector in Wales. Its central intent is to
destabilise the dominant thinking about NHS management practice and to evoke
intellectual debate about alternative discourses of management that
ontologically perceive the organisation as a complex adaptive human system.
The emergent theoretical framework conjoins the discipline of Complexity with
post-structural conjecture, posing a novel conceptualisation of a fractal self
where relations of power are seen as essential for harmonising diverse
influences and legitimising a local discourse that informs and regulates practice.
Using Foucault’s insights on power and knowledge the thesis critiques the
strategic nature of NHS discourse, exposing the discursive dominance of
managerialism and its inherent relations of power and debates what this
predicates for a local negotiation and a flexible, safe and innovative
environment. The methodological approach employs a reflexive and micro-level
interpretative strategy to emphasise the singularity of agents and to explore the
way in which the discursive constitution of the self influences agent practice.
My profound experience of the secondary care system requires I situate my self
reflexively within the context where I explore and liberate my own voice in
conjunction with my participants. The research adopts a biographical narrative
method of data collection and uses Foucauldian discourse analysis as a
framework for exploring the underlying discourse in agent stories. The findings
demonstrate the polyphonic nature of the secondary care context and reveal the demonstrate the polyphonic nature of the secondary care context and reveal the
diverse ways in which agents legitimise, negotiate or resist the conflicting truth
claims of various discourse in order to strategically sustain an image of health
care historically constituted in their self. The results portray a web of discourses
that endorse conformity or complicity through oppressive mechanisms of
disciplinary control and surveillance, perpetuating authoritative and dualist
structures, dissipating relations of trust and removing intellectual thinking from
the front-line. The conclusion asserts that this significantly jeopardises the
ability of agents to legitimise local ‘discourse’, severely limiting their capacity for adaptive practice and the generation of new order
