Guest post by Richard Berner, Executive-in-Residence (Center for Global Economy and Business) and Adjunct Professor, NYU Stern School of Business

America faces two interrelated long-term challenges: rising longevity and inadequate retirement saving. The combination of declining private, defined-benefit pension plans and concerns about the viability of federal entitlements has intensified these challenges. While the economic recovery has raised confidence about retirement resources at the margin (see here), workers and retirees remain concerned about how they will meet future basic expenses, medical needs or the cost of long-term care.

Those developments mean that achieving saving goals increasingly must rely on individuals’ thrift and intelligent, efficient investing. Tax-advantaged vehicles that encourage saving (like 401k and IRA accounts), and efficient investment vehicles like mutual funds that follow market-wide stock price indexes are cornerstones of that system.

Yet, some scholars of industrial organization claim that collective investment vehicles―mutual funds, exchange-traded funds (ETFs), and the like―involve “common ownership” that results in softened competition by the firms included in their portfolios (see here, here and here). And, key antitrust enforcers, like the European Competition Commissioner, are looking carefully at this issue. In this post, I argue that the evidence for a causal link between the rise of collective investment vehicles and diminished competition is weak, and far from sufficient to justify interventions that would diminish the attractiveness of these saving mechanisms….