The financial turmoil of 2008 highlighted the importance of default investment options in mandatory defined contribution pensions. Their design can improve the scope for intertemporal risk diversification for individuals and increase the likelihood of achieving adequate replacement rates during...

Stress testing is a useful and increasingly popular, yet sometimes misunderstood, method of analyzing the resilience of financial systems to adverse events. This paper aims to help demystify stress tests and illustrate their strengths and weaknesses. Using an Excel-based template with...

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...

This paper analyzes the performance and development of the Mexican pension annuity market established as a consequence of the 1997 pension reform. The Mexican experience displays interesting characteristics providing lessons for other countries that still need to design the decumulation phase of...

"The performance of the Hungarian second pillar since inception has been mixed. This is partly due to a less than satisfactory support for the 1997 pension reform, conservative fund portfolio distributions, the hybrid nature of the mandatory pension fund system, the segmented nature of the...