Unforseen

on the first point, curriculum doesn't really talk about changing leverage without doing it via the pension scheme. It does say equity beta comes from the market, it's how investors perceive the risk of your stock. So you would start here then get op asset beta.

Then it moves on to adding pension risk. Decreasing the weight of equity on the liability side does decrease the overall beta.

On the asset side you solve backwards to your operating beta (by taking out of total beta the beta of shares your pension scheme invests in) which is used to find wacc.

Further on from that, when they fiddle with the proportion of shares of pension scheme, they say that more shares = more risk for firm => higher equity beta. But it's highlighted as a "framework for thinking about the effects of different asset allocation on the risk of the enterprise". So to me that says it's what you could expect to observe in the mkt.