Target Date Fund Flows Amidst the COVID-19 Pandemic

The popularity of target date funds (TDFs) has recently increased among defined contribution pension plans. Despite their growing importance, how TDF flows and flowperformance relationships have changed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic is yet to be examined, particularly during the March 2020 market turmoil, when bond funds witnessed unprecedented outflows. We find that short-horizon TDFs experienced sizable outflows of over $13.5 billion between February and April 2020, whereas mid- and long-horizon TDFs received inflows over the same period. Given that short-horizon TDFs hold a much larger fraction of their portfolios on fixed-income securities, the outflows from these TDFs, whose fund-of-funds investment structure has been identified as a source of intra-family liquidity provision in previous studies, may have compromised the effectiveness of this liquidity provision mechanism during the COVID-19 market crash. We find that in the aftermath of the pandemic, the flow–performance relationship of short-horizon TDFs becomes markedly more concave, which hints at investors’ greater awareness of the downside risks associated with large outflows following their experience during the COVID-19 turmoil.