Netspar Talent Grant for Anne Kellers

Assistant Professor Anne Kellers has received a Talent Grant of €100.000 from Netspar (Knowledge Network for Future-Proof Pensions) for her project ‘From Preferences to Portfolios: Eliciting and Implementing Sustainability Preferences in Collective Portfolios’. The project explores how Dutch pension funds can better understand and incorporate their participants' sustainability preferences into investment decisions.

Pension providers have a fiduciary duty to invest in line with their participants’ preferences. For sustainability, this is particularly difficult, because these preferences are multi-dimensional and often conflicting. When it comes to their pensions, participants may want sustainability integrated to enhance financial performance, drive meaningful real-world impact, or mitigate harm and align investments with their values. These motives point to different policies: an impact motive may argue for staying invested in a high-emission firm to exercise influence through engagement, while a do-no-harm motive argues for excluding that same firm.

In her reseach, Anne Kellers will study how sustainability preferences can be measured, aggregated, and implemented in pension portfolios. A central challenge is how pension funds can invest collectively on behalf of individuals who may have very different views on what their pension money should be invested in. First, Kellers will develop methods to elicit whether participants hold a sustainability preference, which motive drives it, and how strong and stable the preference is. She then will study mechanisms for aggregating heterogeneous preferences into a collective policy, examining trade-offs between efficiency, representation, and feasibility. Finally, Kellers will map these policies onto the instruments pension providers use, from exclusion and best-in-class tilting to engagement and proxy voting, and experimentally test how participants respond to the resulting policies.

Highly relevant for the Dutch pension practice

Kellers is an assistant professor at FEB’s Department of Global Economics & Management. In her project, she is collaborating with the pension providers Aegon and TKP in Groningen. The research project is highly relevant for the Dutch pension practice. It aims to help Dutch pension funds better align investments with participant values. While risk preference surveys are already standard, sustainability preferences remain underdeveloped — despite growing demand for responsible investing and stricter regulatory scrutiny.

The project seeks to fill key gaps by developing three practical tools: a validated survey to measure sustainability preferences, a framework for aggregating diverse participant views into policy decisions, and guidance on matching preferences with investment strategies while improving transparency. By translating academic insights into industry-friendly resources and engaging pension professionals early, the research aims to enhance trust, legitimacy, and real-world impact in sustainable pension investing.

Netspar Talent Grant

Netspar is a knowledge network that advances a well-informed pension debate based on scientific research. The network connects science and the pension industry, through knowledge development and knowledge dissemination, contributing to future-proof pensions in the Netherlands. Every year, Netspar awards various types of grants to researchers. For young scholars, the Netspar Talent Grant provides an opportunity to work on translating scientific research into insights that can be used for real-life financial decision making and policy debates in the pension and insurance industry.

Kellers is delighted to receive the Netspar Talent Grant. “What makes this opportunity particularly meaningful to me is the chance to increase the real-world impact of my research, which focuses on understanding how sustainability preferences can be reflected in investment decisions. I look forward to collaborating closely with pension funds and other partners through Netspar’s network, exchanging ideas and developing new approaches that can make a meaningful difference for pension participants.”

Questions? Please contact Anne Kellers.