Regulations restricting investment by pension funds in high risk and foreign assets may quarantine member accounts from contagious transmissions during financial crises. This paper analyses contagion from US equity markets to emerging market autarchic assets (Colombian private pension funds)...

We derive and estimate the optimal disbursement from an infinitely-lived charitable trust with an Epstein-Zin-Weil utility function, given general Markovian returns to wealth. We analyze two special cases: where spending is a power function of last period's wealth and the endowment uses 'payout...

Little empirical work has been done on the return properties of infrastructure as an asset class despite increased allocations by institutional investors. Managers claim infrastructure investments offer real return benefits via a combination of monopolistic and defensive assets. We build a...

Existing research suggests the average private equity* manager does not create excess returns over public markets net of fees. We confirm this result using a factor model that allows for leverage, illiquidity and volatility clustering. The model explains 70 to 90 per cent of the variation in...

: We report the results of two laboratory experiments that study how university student and staff participants chose retirement savings investment options using ‘user-friendly’ information prescribed by regulators. We demonstrate that choices of more than 20% of participants cannot be...

Detecting contagion during financial crises requires demarcation of crisis periods. This paper presents a method for endogenous dating of both the start and finish of crises, coupled with the statistical detection of contagion effects. We couple smooth transition functions with structural GARCH...

We study bi-variate conditional volatility and correlation dynamics for individual commodity futures and financial assets from May 1990-July 2009 using DSTCC-GARCH (Silvennoinen and Terasvirta 2009). These models allow correlation to vary smoothly between extreme states via transition functions...

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...

Individuals, endowments and trusts face uncertain lifetimes. When the planning horizon of an entity is stochastic and Pareto distributed, hyperbolic discounting and time-varying consumption rates are optimal. We derive expressions for the optimal rate of consumption (draw-down) from wealth for...