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Pension funds poses an important place in terms of increasing and encouraging savings for economies of countries. Accordingly, the private pension system in Turkey, which entered into force on 27 October 2003, has been still under development. Therefore, the performance of the pension funds has a considerable indicator characteristic for investors to utilize their savings with these investment instruments. Beside these, in Turkey, for spreading saving ability to all components of the society investors who have Islamic sensitiveness have been channelized into pension funds with new "helal" pension funds. In this study, performance of these pension funds operating in Turkey in the period of January 2013 and August 2015 will be measured by using regression analysis with explanatory benchmarks. For this purpose single and multi regression models will be employed. BIST 100, Government Debt Securities (GDS), and Gold Price Indices will be employed as explanatory variables for the single and multi regression models applied to pension funds.

This dissertation investigates the average and median impact of large natural disasters on government debt. It includes 163 countries for the period 1971 to 2014. We apply a panel synthetic control method which constructs a counterfactual for the disaster country. This synthetic control group consists of nondisaster countries that closely resemble the macroeconomic, institutional, geographical and other characteristics of disaster country in the predisaster period. We investigate the difference in government debt between the disaster countries and their respective synthetic control groups. Our findings reveal a considerable increase in government debt for most damaging and deadliest disasters. Government debt, on average, increases by 11.3% of GDP compared to the synthetic control group. The median effect on government debt is 6.8% of GDP. Some natural disasters result in a debt increase over 20% of GDP. When we investigate only the 0.5% largest natural disasters, this study finds even larger effects on government debt. We also investigate the different impacts of different types of disasters. Earthquakes, on average, lead to an increase in government debt of 30.2% of GDP. Floods increase government debt by 7.7% of GDP, while storms increase the level of government debt by 9.5% of GDP compared to the synthetic control group. The effect of natural disasters is even larger than the fiscal costs of financial sector bailouts during the financial crisis. This dissertation also investigates herding behavior exhibited by Dutch pension funds in the sovereign bond market. It uses a unique dataset on sovereign bond holdings of 67 large Dutch pension funds, mutations, and transactions in 109 countries between December 2008 and December 2014. We find evidence of intensive herding behavior of Dutch pension funds in sovereign bonds. Our findings also show that institutional factors, the macroeconomic environment, and the financial market environment are among the determinants of herding behavior in sovereign bonds. Our ...