The author argues that public and private pillars are essential for a well-functioning pension system. Public pillars, funded or unfounded, offer basic benefits that are independent of the performance of financial markets. Since financial markets suffer from prolonged, persistent, and large...

The main purpose of this paper is to examine the growing use of derivatives by Danish pension institutions as a risk management tool to hedge embedded options on their balance sheets. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s it was a widespread practice for Danish pension institutions to guarantee a...

The Danish ATP (Arbejdmarkedets TillaegsPension or Labor Market Supplementary Pension) fund is a public pension fund that was created in 1964 to complement the universal pension benefit that is financed from general tax revenues and is paid to all old-age residents. When it was created,...

Public pension funds have the potential to benefit from low operating costs because they enjoy economies of scale and avoid large marketing costs. But this important advantage has in most countries been dissipated by poor investment performance. The latter has been attributed to a weak...

With few exceptions, mainly in Asia, mutual funds grew explosively in most countries around the world during the 1990s. Equity funds predominated in Anglo-American countries while bond funds predominated in most of Continental Europe, and in middle-income countries. Capital market development...

The authors provide a detailed study of the Swiss pension system, analyzing its strengths and weaknesses. The unfunded public pillar is highly redistributive. It has near universal coverage, a low dispersion of benefits (the maximum public pension is twice the minimum), and no ceiling on...

One of the strongest objections to personal pension plans is that they transfer investment risk to individual workers, who are then exposed to the vagaries of equity and bond markets. Using historical United States data, the authors investigate the impact of the volatility of investment returns...

The link between pension reform, and capital market development, has become a perennial question, raised every time the potential benefits, and pre-conditions of pension reform are discussed. The author asks two questions. First, what are the basic "feasibility" pre-conditions for the successful...