Uncertainty about length of life, longevity risk, is a growing financial problem for pension funds and annuity providers. They would like to transfer longevity risk away to institutions better placed to deal with it. Unfortunately, there is a lack of financial instruments to hedge against this...

Using data on all employees at listed companies in Taiwan, where pension plans were rare, we find that bias toward employer stocks is generic to individual investor decisionmaking, but not limited to retirement plans. 71 percent of sample employees invest in employer stocks and the employer...

This paper quantifies the impact of return uncertainty when measuring the relative benefits of mutual funds versus variable annuities by calculating the certainty equivalents of utility. This paper points out that the possibility of an investment loss endows the holder of the mutual fund with a...

Despite only having been in existence for 27 years - less than a typical working career - some analysts seem to have concluded that 401(k) plans are a failure. For example, Munnell and Sundn (2004, 2006) argue that the 401(k) is quot;coming up shortquot; due to, among other factors, low...

We analyse the effects of pension reforms on the planned retirement age of women by exploiting within country variation in pension wealth across cohorts of workers in Italy after the Amato and Dini reforms of the early 1990s, which introduced a quot;Notionally Defined Contributionquot; (NDC)...

In this paper, we contribute to the current debate on the Italian pension system by analyzing the impact of social security reforms, in terms of both budgetary implications and distributional effects. This is done by simulating the effects of three hypothetical reforms, plus the effects of the...

After 2000, the vast majority of defined benefit (DB) pension plans encountered a decrease in their funding ratios, largely due to a drop in asset prices. It is possible that public sector pension plans may have acted imprudently by chasing returns, once they encountered underfunding. We...

The effect that health has on the retirement decision has long been studied. We examine the reverse relationship, whether retirement has a direct impact on later-life health. To identify the causal relationship, we use early retirement window offers to instrument for retirement. We find no...

Current multi-pillar pension plans have adopted the same retirement age for the defined benefit (DB) and defined contribution (DC) components of the plan. This paper considers potential benefits obtainable from coordinating DB and DC benefits. The plan proposed here involves establishing an...

It has been the author's privilege in recent years to personally visit with a number of nationally recognized retirement industry gurus. Generally speaking, these discussions have tended to identify two obstacles as blocking the implementation of any corporate strategy designed to retire workers...