Prior literature on asset patterns among the elderly often overlooks housing wealth as a determinant of retiree wealth, particularly in the Japanese context. Yet releasing equity in housing may be a natural mechanism to boost consumption, reduce public pension liability, and mitigate the demand...

The pension landscape in the U.S. has changed dramatically over the past 25 years. Saving through personal retirement accounts has become the principal form of retirement saving. We document the transition from a defined benefit system to a personal account system and show the effect it has had...

Academic and practitioner research yields a proliferation of methods using size and value/growth attributes or factors to evaluate portfolio performance. We assess the relative merits of several of the most widely-used procedures, including variants of matched-characteristic benchmark portfolios...

Mutual funds change their risk levels significantly over time. This paper investigates the performance consequences of risk shifting, as well as the economic motivations and the mechanisms of risk shifting. Using a holdings-based measure of risk shifting, we find that funds that increase risk...

The recent growth in the market for target-date funds (TDFs) allows us to study how mutual fund families structure new investment products. Given the widespread, legislation-induced use of TDFs as default investments in defined contribution retirement plans, this market holds special policy...

Individual responsibility for portfolio construction is a central theme for defined contribution pensions, yet the rise of target-date funds is shifting investment decisions from workers back to employers. A complex choice architecture including automatic enrollment, reenrollment, and fund...

Within the Oregon University System's defined contribution retirement plan, one investment provider offers access to face-to-face financial advice through its network of brokers. We find that younger, less highly educated, and less highly paid employees are more likely to choose this provider....

We develop a new methodology that allows conditional performance to be a function of information available at the start of the performance period but does not make assumptions about the behavior of the conditional betas. We use econometric techniques developed by Lynch and Wachter (2011) that...

This paper uses micro-level data on mutual funds from different financial centers investing in equity and bonds to study how investors and managers behave and transmit shocks across countries. The paper finds that the volatility of mutual fund investments is driven quantitatively by both the...