Millions of defined benefit pensioners must select a pension insurance method. We present a framework for making this decision within the context of US military veterans' Survivor Benefit Plan (SBP). Federal government subsidies generate a positive expected net payout for SBP. While insurance...

Despite ever more sophisticated risk management and measurement, investment professionals have generally overlooked a simple but powerful metric of relative risk and portfolio diversification -- the normal return gap. We develop a generalized specification of the expected difference in returns...