This paper focuses on describing the international practice on the various forms of retirement benefit payment currently allowed in countries throughout the world and the regulatory environment surrounding these different forms of benefit payment. The analysis suggests considerable variance...

Individual retirement savings accounts are replacing or supplementing public basic pensions. However at decumulation, replacing the public pension with an equivalent private sector income stream may be costly. We value the Australian basic pension by calculating the wealth needed to generate an...

A considerable literature examines the optimal decumulation of financial wealth in retirement. We extend this line of research to incorporate housing, which comprises the majority of most households' non-pension wealth. We estimate the relationship between the returns on housing, stocks, and...

In this paper, we study how the portfolios of elderly U.S. households evolve after retirement, using data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS). In particular, we investigate the influence of aging and health shocks on a household's ownership of various assets and on the dollar value and...

Over the next quarter century there will be a dramatic shift in the percentage of the U.S. population that is retired. This will strain entitlement programs such as social security and will potentially impact capital markets. In this paper I present evidence of changes in the asset holdings of...

This paper examines the investment decisions of older individual investors. We find that older and experienced investors are more likely to follow quot;rules of thumbquot; that reflect greater investment knowledge. However, older investors are less effective in applying their investment...

This paper uses the most recent data (2004) from the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF), a triennial survey of family finances by the Federal Reserve Board, as well as historical SCF data, to examine the demographic factors associated with the ownership of individual account retirement plan...

Conventional wisdom assumes that homeownership is risky because house prices are volatile. But all households start life short housing services, and homeownership could be a less risky way of obtaining those services than the alternative, renting. While a renter faces year-toyear fluctuations in...

This paper reviews the impact of aging on private pensions, in particular on the payout phase, assesses the part that annuities can play in financing retirement, and examines the role of financial markets in facilitating the allocation on assets accumulated in defined contribution pension plans....