Pensions &Investments' staff gathered the information for this report in three steps.
Questionnaires were sent to more than 1,200 fund sponsors in P&I's database. The largest 1,000 were identified from the completed questionnaires, follow-up phone calls and e-mails.
Data for funds that did not respond were culled from published annual reports and the Form 5500s filed with the Department of Labor.
Rocaton Investment Advisors LLC and Bloomberg LP also provided source materials used as references to gather the most recent historical asset data for certain plans.
P&I's survey generally covers the 12-month period ended Sept. 30, 2013. In cases where no information was available from the fund, or the data obtained were older than that date, P&I calculated estimates to Sept. 30, 2013.
In the accompanying rankings and charts, dollar amounts are rounded to the nearest million. The aggregate asset mixes represent the averages of all reported allocations for the respective funds.
