This paper examines the tilt and risk-return characteristics of real retirement incomes provided by variable annuities tied to bills, long-term bonds, stocks and a mixed portfolio which combines all three. The analysis emphasizes the riskiness of the real value of benefits provided by...

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 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...

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...

This paper applies the Capital Asset Pricing Model to help explain the anomalous behavior of real interest rates during the last several years. Specifically,we are able to show that the increased volatility of bond prices since the change in Federal Reserve operating procedure in October 1979...

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 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 examines the effect of the labor-leisure choice on portfolio and consumption decisions over an individual's life cycle. The model incorporates the fact that individuals may have considerable flexibility in varying their work effort (including their choice of when to retire). Given...

The recent introduction of CPI-linked bonds by several financial institutions is a milestone in the history of the U.S. financial system. It has potentially far-reaching effects on individual and institutional asset allocation decisions because these securities represent the only true long-run...

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...