Using data on private Turkish pension funds we show that most active managers are not able to provide performance beyond what could be achieved by passive indexing. The average fund beats its benchmark by only 26 basis points, before fees. We also observe herding behavior among managers' asset allocation decisions which can potentially explain their lack of overperformance. Our results strongly support the need for low-cost index funds in emerging market countries that are reforming their pension schemes. We further recommend regulatory oversight on the "activeness" of funds and introduction of default plans with more balanced asset allocations.

We apply the Diebold and Yilmaz (2014) methodology to daily stock prices of the largest 40 U.S. financial institutions to construct a volatility connectedness index. We then estimate the contemporaneous return sensitivity of every non-financial U.S. company to this index. We find that there is a large statistically significant difference between the returns of firms with positive and negative exposures to financial connectedness. The four-factor alpha of a strategy that goes long in the bottom decile and short in the top decile of stocks sorted on their connectedness betas is roughly 15% per annum. Bivariate portfolio tests reveal that abnormal returns are robust to market beta, size, book-to-market ratio, momentum, debt, illiquidity, and idiosyncratic volatility. Abnormal returns are asymmetric; they are primarily driven by firms whose returns covary negatively with the index. These firms tend to be young and small, with poor past performance and low credit quality.

Using data on private Turkish pension funds we show that most active managers are not able to provide performance beyond what could be achieved by passive indexing. The average fund beats its benchmark by only 26 basis points, before fees. We also observe herding behavior among managers' asset allocation decisions which can potentially explain their lack of overperformance. Our results strongly support the need for low-cost index funds in emerging market countries that are reforming their pension schemes. We further recommend regulatory oversight on the "activeness" of funds and introduction of default plans with more balanced asset allocations.

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