This paper examines the role that advertising plays in the mutual fund industry and whether advertising affects investors' fund and portfolio choices. Content analysis shows that only a small fraction of fund advertising is directly informative about characteristics relevant for rational...

Using a unique large-scale event, the year 2000 launch of a privatized social security system involving individual savings accounts in Sweden, I report empirical evidence on the link between fund advertising and people’s fund and portfolio choices. First, content analysis reveals that a very...

The Securities and Exchange Commission's disclosure philosophy has largely focused on a single model: the publicly held corporation. From its inception, the SEC's disclosure framework for mutual funds has been a relative backwater and based largely on the disclosure framework for publicly held...

A worker can contribute pre-tax dollars to a private pension plan. Under a progressive tax, this feature reduces income taxes. Ippolito (1986} argues that an individual in 1979 can reduce lifetime taxes by 20%. We re-examine his analysis using the complete time-series of US income tax history...

A worker can reduce tax liability by contributing to a private pension plan when marginal tax rates are high and withdraw pension benefits when marginal tax rates are low. We quantify the tax benefit of income smoothing through the private retirement system and find that it is negligible. This...

This paper discusses responses to current financial and economic crisis by regulators, supervisors and policy makers in the area of private pensions. These responses are examined in the light of international guidelines, best practices and recommendations to improve the design of private...

This paper assesses the impact of different quantitative approaches to regulate investment risk on the retirement income stemming from defined contribution (DC) pension plans. It looks at how such regulations affect the spectrum of investment policies available and, through this channel, how...

This paper assesses the relative performance of different investment strategies for different structures of the payout phase. In particular, it looks at whether the specific glide-path of life-cycle investment strategies and the introduction of dynamic features in the design of default...

We provide new empirical evidence concerning the contentious debate over the use of historical cost (HCA) versus mark-to-market (MTM) accounting in regulating financial institutions. These accounting rules, through their interactions with capital regulations, alter financial institutions’...