The Pensions Scholarship Trust was established in 2019 as a trust under UK law and has five trustees:
The Trustees
- Martine Menko, (Member of the Supervisory Board Stichting Allgemeen Pensioenfonds STAP, Netherlands); Trust Chairperson
- Liam Kennedy (Editor of IPE and a Director of IPE International Publishers Ltd); Trust Treasurer
- Fennell Betson (Founding Editor of IPE); Trust Secretary
- Gregg McClymont (Executive Director Public Affairs IFM Investors UK)
- Alan Rubenstein (former CEO, Pension Protection Fund)
The Pensions Scholarship Trust is a registered charity with the Charity Commission in the UK. Its registered number is 1188040.
Pensions Scholarship Trust grants awarded
The Pensions Scholarship Trust had been active since its launch in 2019 by making grants available to those undertaking research or studying the area of pension and retirement income provision in Europe. Since then, we have awarded grants of €5,000 to students undertaking their PhD study and research at universities in Denmark, Turkey, Germany and the UK. Further details of each of these are given below, with a link to the relevant press release issued at the time.
2023
The Trust has made a full grant to Oliver-Alexander Press, regarding his PhD studies and research at the Copenhagen Business School in Denmark. His project investigates how the riskiness of an individual’s retirement savings affects the risk they take when investing their non-retirement savings.
2022
The Trust has made a full grant of €5,000 to Yaşar Kemal Peştreli, in connection with his PhD studies and research at Ozyegin University in Turkey. His research will examine the relationship between pension funds and local bond market volatility in OECD countries. Studies up to now have focused on pension funds’ impact on stock-market volatility or development.
A grant amounting to €5,000 was awarded to David Pinkus who is undertaking PhD studies and research at the Copenhagen Business School in Denmark. His area of study is the impact of pension funds on the productivity and innovation of the companies they invest in.
A second award amounting to €5,000 has been awarded to Seda Peksevim, who is completing her PhD studies at Boğaziçi University in Turkey. Her studies investigate the effect of pension funds on the liquidity of financial markets in 27 EU countries, during crisis and non-crisis periods.
2021
An award of €5,000 was made to Marlene Koch in connection with her PhD studies and research at the University of Konstanz in Germany. The focus of her project is design of a flexible retirement saving scheme which would only require households to contribute to retirement saving schemes if they have not built up sufficient other savings.
In April 2021, the Trust made an award of €5,000 to Zucheng Zhao in support of his PhD studies at the University of Reading’s Henley Business School in the UK. His current study and research is on the effects of the closure of defined benefit occupational pension schemes in the UK on the sponsoring employer’s risk and scheme asset allocation.
2020
A full grant of €5,000 was made to Seda Peksevim in support of her work on designing optimal mandatory and auto-enrolment pensions systems in emerging market economies. She is a researcher at the Center for Applied Research in Finance (CARF) and currently undertaking a PhD programme at Boğaziçi University.