This paper addresses the issue of how an investor concerned about the real rate of return on his investment portfolio should allocate his funds among four major asset classes: stocks, bonds, bills and commodity futures contracts. It employs the Markowitz mean-variance framework to derive...

This paper develops the view that employer-sponsored pension plans are best understood as retirement income insurance for employees and from that perspective addresses a number of questions regarding the reasons for their existence, their design, and their funding and investment policies. The...

The manifest purposes of integrating an employer-provided pension plan with social security are:(1) to ensure retirement income adequacy for all covered employees; and (2) to ensure retirement income equity, defined as equal total replacement rates for all employees regardless of salary level....

This paper develops a model showing that people who have flexibility in choosing how much to work will prefer to invest substantially more of their money in risky assets than if they had no such flexibility. Viewed in this way, labor supply flexibility offers insurance against adverse investment...

This paper proposes a new approach to improve the way central banks can analyze and manage the financial risks of a national economy. It is based on the modern theory and practice of contingent claims analysis (CCA), which is successfully used today at the level of individual banks by managers,...

The high cost of international economic and financial crises highlights the need for a comprehensive framework to assess the robustness of national economic and financial systems. This paper proposes a new comprehensive approach to measure, analyze, and manage macroeconomic risk based on the...

This paper examines the empirical question of whether systematic equity risk of U.S. firms as measured by beta from the Capital Asset Pricing Model reflects the risk of their pension plans. There are a number of reasons to suspect that it might not. Chief among them is the opaque set of...

This paper proposes a functional approach to designing and managing the financial systems of countries, regions, firms, households, and other entities. It is a synthesis of the neoclassical, neo-institutional, and behavioral perspectives. Neoclassical theory is an ideal driver to link science...

This paper is organized as follows: The first part of the paper introduces the topic. In the next part, we explore the inadequacies of conventional and equity-based variable annuities in an inflationary environment by contrasting them with a hypothetical PPA. We then try to assess the...

This paper investigates the effect of inflation uncertainty on the portfolio behavior of households and the equilibrium structure of capitol market rates. The principal findings regarding portfolio behavior are: (1.) In the presence of inflation uncertainty, households will have an...