After declining worldwide since the late 1080s, defined benefits plans will not recover their previous dominance in Australia because they can only be offered by large and stable organisations. Since 1992, Australia has had compulsory superannuation that is mostly privately managed in addition,...

We survey the long-term derivative instruments (warrants) offered by Australian institutions to elderly Australian investors. Our focus is on products other than plain-vanilla life annuities. There are currently four active products. They incorporate a strike price which is either constant or...

Luxury bequests impart systematic effects of age to an investor's optimal allocation: the expected percentage allocation to equities rises throughout retirement. When bequests are luxuries the marginal utility of bequests declines more slowly than the marginal utility of consumption. This is...

The retirement risk zone represents a fragile period in the financial life cycle of people in defined-contributions superannuation. It primarily affects people of middle means. Sequencing risk has been described as an independent risk but it has largely been a consequence of the dominant asset...

Recent OECD data offer limited support for the proposition that our company tax rate could be cut substantially with little or no loss of tax revenue. Treasury‐type analysis suggests otherwise: our headline rate could be cut to 20 per cent if abolishing dividend imputation were used to finance...

Using proprietary Australian Tax Office (ATO) data, we document the size, asset allocation and expenses for a sample of 209,420 Australian self-managed superannuation funds (SMSFs) for the three years to June 2010. Two recent Government reviews have highlighted a lack of basic knowledge of the...

Using proprietary data, this study examines auditor industry specialisation, professional brand effects and non-audit services (NAS) in the self-managed superannuation fund (SMSF) sector, the fastest growing and largest segment of the Australian $1.75 trillion retirement savings industry. We...

This paper summarizes views on the superannuation system and its regulation collected through interviews of fund executives. While the majority of interviewees saw the superannuation system as working relatively well, some areas of concern were detected. Issues raised relate to: certain aspects...

We combine survey data from retirement plan members with information from interviews with plan executives to get both perspectives on who accepts the default plan and default investment option and why. We use a natural experiment in default construction where a new regulatory framework required...

We interview Australian fund executives about how their organisations responded to MySuper, a regulatory framework for default retirement savings funds that providers were required to have in place by the beginning of 2014. In addition to providing an account of the influences on product design...