Sponsor Bias in Pension Fund Administrative Expenses: The Brazilian Experience

Abstract Previous literature has reported that pension funds sponsored by public organizations present greater administrative expenses when compared to similar pension funds sponsored by private organizations. We investigate this sponsor bias, hypothesizing that it may originate from the omission of relevant control variables, specifically variables for location of headquarters and the level of outsourced services. We test this hypothesis by linear regression in the cross-section of 164 Brazilian closed pension funds, using annual data from 2010 to 2014. We find that these control variables pa...