ABSTRACT
As the nation with the largest Muslim population in the world, Indonesian regulation mandates that social security must be administered in accordance with sharia principles. In November 2021, the Employment Social Security Administration (BPJS Ketenagakerjaan) introduced a sharia social security program comprising the Old Age Security (JHT) program. However, there is no specific investment guide for administering these sharia JHT funds, therefore they must be managed as conventional JHT funds domestically. In practice, the domestic Islamic capital market, which is dominated by fixed-income assets, continues to lag the global Islamic stock market. In addition, scholarly research discussing the appropriate management of JHT funds at institutions such as BPJS Ketenagakerjaan is relatively uncommon. Determining the optimal allocation for each asset class in the sharia JHT fund portfolio managed by BPJS Ketenagakerjaan is the purpose of this study. This study uses a quantitative method with a prescriptive model based on Modern Portfolio Theory. The data utilized is the Net Asset Value (NAV) of Islamic mutual funds that are categorized by asset class on the domestic (Indonesian) and international markets for the past five years (2016-2021). The results indicate that a portfolio with a 39.95% allocation to foreign assets has an annualized 32% greater expected return than a portfolio limited to domestic assets solely. In addition, the annualized systemic risk of the global portfolio is 5% less than that of the domestic portfolio. These results imply that investment management in Islamic JHT funds can be optimized if placement constraints on the domestic Islamic financial market are loosened. This study therefore suggests that these constraints be reevaluated in the future, particularly for institutional investors with big assets under management. The results of this study are also anticipated to be useful for other Islamic fund management organizations in identifying the optimal asset allocation for their portfolios, as well as for academics who intend to do further research on Islamic investment management..
