This report presents lessons and observations from abroad that can help in the successful completion of the current pension reforms in the Netherlands. These lessons are based on discussions with and texts from a large number of international experts from nine countries that have gone through a...

Collective pension arrangements tend to yield higher risk-adjusted pension benefits than individual plans due to intergenerational risk sharing and the lack of annuity conversion risk. These benefits pose the implicit assumption that the pension fund has an infinite horizon, while we observe...

We report the effects of framing and default settings in annuity demand after conducting a survey-based experiment with over 3,000 members of a Dutch occupational pension plan. The participants were asked to allocate their real projected pension accrual between a life annuity and a partial lump...

The Dutch pension fund system, considered among the best in the world, successfully combines a first-pillar flat-rate pension for all residents with a labor-related second pillar and voluntary savings accounts as the third pillar. This paper describes the main institutional characteristics of...

The structure and organization of pension systems vary considerably across countries. Pension fund regulation and supervision are two characteristics of pension systems that exemplify such variation. This paper provides a structured approach to measure cross-country differences in the intensity...

The market for corporate control in the second largest economy in the world behaves very different from that in the U.S. Using a sample of 91 mergers in the period 1982-2003 we document several distinctive features of this market in Japan. First, we show that in stark contrast to the...

Administrative costs per participant appear to vary widely across pension funds in different countries. These costs are important because they reduce the rate of return on the investments of pension funds, and consequently raise the cost of retirement security. Using unique data on 90 pension...

The 2008 credit crisis came as a complete surprise to most financial practitioners and academics. As risk models had largely been unable to predict the crisis and its impact on volatilities and correlations, the usefulness of such models has been widely called into question. This paper proposes...

Administrative costs per participant appear to vary widely across pension funds in different countries. These costs are important because they reduce the rate of return on the investments of pension funds, and consequently raise the cost of retirement security. Using unique data on 90 pension...

In this paper, we propose a new risk model to better address events like the recent credit crisis. First, the possible start of a crisis is modeled by including a low-probability jump process. Second, the risk characteristics of the crisis are captured by allowing for time-varying volatilities...