Frijns, BPM2013-10-252013-10-252013-09-052013-09-05Auckland Centre for Financial Research, AUT Business School. Working Paper. URL: http://www.aut.ac.nz/__data/assets/pdf_file/0005/408722/Kiwisaver_performance.pdfhttps://hdl.handle.net/10292/5775This study investigates three issues: (1) the replicability of KiwiSaver Balanced (and other intermediate) funds based on a combination of Conservative and Growth funds offered by the same provider; (2) the risk-adjusted performance of the KiwiSaver Growth funds; (3) the market timing skill of KiwiSaver fund managers. We find that for the majority of fund providers, Moderate/Balanced funds are linear combinations of the Conservative and Growth funds with some mispricing between the fees of the actual fund and the reconstructed fund. We further report substantial variation in the amount of risk-taking, and local and international stock market exposure of KiwiSaver Growth funds, making it meaningless to compare these funds simply based on their returns. Using risk-adjusted performance metrics, we observe there is no evidence of systematic outperformance of KiwiSaver Growth funds, and in several cases there is evidence of systematic underperformance. Furthermore there is no sign of market timing skill by KiwiSaver fund managers.40 minutesAuckland University of Technology (AUT) encourages public access to AUT information and supports the legal use of copyright material in accordance with the Copyright Act 1994 (the Act) and the Privacy Act 1993. Unless otherwise stated, copyright material contained on this site may be in the intellectual property of AUT, a member of staff or third parties. Any commercial exploitation of this material is expressly prohibited without the written permission of the owner.KiwiSaverMutual FundsPerformance MeasurementOpenAccess