With the aging population of the U.S., questions of estate planning have grown in importance. For the wealthiest Americans, the federal estate tax can destroy almost half of their wealth. Because of the special tax treatment of death benefits, life insurance has been used for many years to...

We present an asset allocation framework for pension funds in which they can take pension liability risk and uncertainty about future expected asset returns explicitly into account. This framework recognized the liability hedging properties of assets that correlate positively with changes in the...

Long term care is one of the few observable triggers for home sale among the elderly. Combined with a thin reverse mortgage market, this helps rationalize weak demand for Long Term Care Insurance (LTCI). Home equity typically tapped primarily in the event of long term care reduces the gain to...

Aggregate mortality risk - the risk that the mortality trend in a population changes in a nondeterministic way - and its implications for corporate decisions has recently been the subject of lively scientific discussion. We show that aggregate mortality risk is also a key determinant for...

We analyze Berkshire Hathaway's equity portfolio over the 1976 to 2006 period and explore potential explanations for its superior performance. Contrary to popular belief, we find Berkshire Hathaway invests primarily in large-cap growth rather than quot;valuequot; stocks. Over the period the...

Credit risk transfer (CRT) instruments offer important diversification benefits but may magnify shocks since they disperse risk, across both financial and non-financial sectors. Exposures to CRT instruments, such as credit derivatives, are difficult to track, given the lack of public data on...

This report is the first major study of DC investment strategies used in UK defined contribution pension schemes. It is critical of 'traditional' arrangements and urges employers, trustees, and pension practitioners to consider innovative strategies for the default fund, in which the majority of...

Applying the approach used by Eisenberg (2007) to derive the marginal price of risk for an expected value maximizing manager who has a Var constraint, I derive the marginal price of risk given a Cvar (Acerbi and Tasche, 2001), also known as an expected shortfall constraint. Despite the criticism...

The wealth dynamics of insurance companies strongly depends on the success of their investment strategies, but also on liquidity shocks which occur during unfavorable years, when indemnities to be paid to the clients exceed collected premia. An investment strategy that does not take liquidity...