This study examines the consequences of a pension fund investing in the stock of the sponsoring firm. Using a merger of data on pension asset holdings from IRS Form 5500 filings and financial data on the company's stock from CRSP, two broad questions are addressed: First, what factors influence...

Governments are increasingly concerned about the capacity of pensions systems to meet demands in the coming years. According to the OECD, one part of the policy response in many countries will be greater private provision on the part of individuals through occupational and other pension...

This paper studies empirically the consequences of retirement on health. We make use of a targeted retirement offer to army employees 55 years of age or older. Before the offer was implemented in the Swedish defense, the normal retirement age was 60 years of age. Estimating the effect of the...

There exists a wide variety of tax treatments of pensions across the world. And the reasons for such a range of regimes are not clear. This note reviews the general principles of pension taxes and analyses the theoretical foundations of why pension incomes ought to be taxed specifically. To do...

In this paper we analyze the possibilities of intergenerational risk sharing in a generational DB pension fund. In a generational pension plan each generation has their own pension scheme and is subject to discretionary investment, indexation and contribution policies, thereby losing...

We propose a generational plan for the occupational pension provision in which people from the same generation are pooled in a generational fund. Each fund can set its own policies independently. This plan provides the benefits of differentiation missing in the prevailing collective plan and the...

New accounting rules and increased scarcity of risk capital have led to growing pressure on corporations to shift pension plan risk from employers to participants. This implies a shift from Defined Benefit (DB) plans to a variety of collective and individual Defined Contributions (DC) plans....

This paper explores the optimal degree of funding of public sector pension plans. It is assumed that a benevolent social planner decides on the contribution of current taxpayers to the funding of public sector pensions next period, weighing the interests of current and future tax payers. Two...

We argue that we should see a negative relationship between the share of risky assets in the default fund of a defined contribution (DC) pension plan and the average plan member age if trustees design the default fund in line with predictions from the life-cycle portfolio choice theory. Adoption...

We use a historical experiment to test whether U.S. corporate defined benefit pension plans strategically use regulatory freedom to lower the reported value of pension liabilities, and hence required cash contributions. For some years, pension plans were required to estimate two liabilities -...