After decades in obscurity, public pension funds are drawing attention as civic organizations raise concerns about the programs’ costs, and as some funds take activist investment stands, such as demanding divestment from firms that do business in Sudan or Iran. The public face of government pension funds was explored at a Wharton Impact Conference titled “ The Future of Public Employee Retirement Systems,” sponsored by Wharton’s Pension Research Council and the Boettner Center for Pensions and Retirement Research. Researchers at the conference presented two papers about the nature of opposition to traditional defined-benefit plans for public employees and the true costs of activist pension investment policies. “Everybody is paying more attention to pensions than they were 30 years ago partly because of the aging population — and the civil servant population is aging more quickly than the population as a whole,” said Olivia Mitchell , Wharton professor of insurance and risk management.…