Public Employee Pension Funds and Social Investments: Recent Performance and a Policy Option for Changing Investment Strategies

ABSTRACT:

Public employee pension funds have emerged as major sources of investment dollars for real estate development. The size of these funds has prompted periodic, but intense, interest in diverting some portion of the resources controlled by fund managers into socially desired investments. While there is a wide range of possible investments that could be classified as socially desirable, a commitment of a portion of the available resources to the redevelopment of metropolitan areas could have an important impact on deteriorating communities and areas that have struggled to attract resources from other investors. This article looks at the issue of social investing, past assessments of the investment strategies of pension funds, and then analyzes the real estate investments made by a group of large public employee pension funds in different states. In noting that the support for redeveloping deteriorating areas is, unfortunately, still lagging, a policy option is presented to increase the level of performance and measure its success.