The information on employee benefit funds contained in this special report was compiled in several steps.
Questionnaires were sent to more than 1,500 fund sponsors in Pensions & Investments' data base. The largest 1,000 were identified from the completed questionnaires, follow-up telephone calls and a cross-check with information supplied by Money Market Directories Inc., Charlottesville, Va., publisher of the 1998 Money Market Directory of Pension Funds and their Investment Managers.
Where no information was available from the fund, figures were taken from the Money Market Directory or the 1998 Nelson's Directory of Plan Sponsors.
Unless otherwise noted in the profiles, the data presented in the tables and stories reflect fund operations as of Sept. 30, 1997.
In cases where the data were considered too old, P&I estimated the asset growth based on one of the following asset mixes: the most recent asset mix supplied by the fund sponsor; the mix reported in the Money Market Directory or Nelson's Directory; or P&I's reported average asset mix for that particular type of fund, i.e. union, public or corporate.
In the profiles and tables, the dollar amounts are rounded to the nearest million.
The aggregate asset mixes for the Top 200 and next 800 funds represent the averages of all reported allocations for the respective funds. The asset mixes for the components of the Top 200 and the next 800 universes were compiled in the same way.
