This paper examines the relationship between U.S. corporations' management of their pension plans and their management of the more familiar aspects of corporate financial structure. The chief conclusion, on the basis of data for 7,828 pension plans sponsored by 1,836 companies and their...

This paper examines the relationship between U.S. corporations' management of their pension plans and their management of the more familiar aspects of corporate financial structure. The chief conclusion, on the basis of data for 7,828 pension plans sponsored by 1,836 companies and their...

Defined-benefit (DB) pension funds, which are often underfunded, rely on the legal obligation of their sponsor to secure pension rights. This paper is the first to solve the optimal portfolio choice problem of pension funds taking into account the risk on the sponsor's guarantee, and we show...

We derive the optimal corporate pension portfolio policy in a consolidated setting in the presence of PBGC insurance. The paper's result formalizes the forces of risk shifting and risk management that shape the form of the corporate pension portfolio. As in Rauh (2009), the risk-shifting and...

We use a modified corporate risk management framework (e.g., Froot and Stein, 1998) to understand how inefficient risk sharing between firms and employees leads to aggressive investment policies of defined corporate pensions as well as their declining popularity. For reasonable parameter values,...

This paper proposes an innovative retirement product with a focus on longevity risk sharing, a contract we refer to as tail index-linked annuity (TILA). Specifically, the proposed TILA pays out variable annual payments, which will be equal to a regular nominal amount when a reference survival...

Protecting against unexpected yield curve, inflation, and longevity shifts are some of the most critical issues institutional and private investors must solve when managing post-retirement income benefits. This paper empirically investigates the performance of alternative immunization strategies...

Defined benefit (DB) pension plans are a primary type of pension schemes with the sponsor assuming most of the risks. Longevity-indexed bonds have been used to hedge or transfer risks in pension plans. Our objective is to study an aggregated DB pension plan's optimal risk management problem...