In most countries, retirement benefits from pension saving must be taken as an annuity. By contrast, Australia allows benefits to be taken as a lump sum and instead has recently introduced various tax incentives to encourage annuity purchase. This paper investigates the effectiveness of these...

A new explanation for the well-known reluctance of retirees to buy life annuities is due to Milevsky and Young (2002, 2003). Specifically, the decision to buy longevity insurance is largely irreversible, so that the real option to delay annuitization generally has value. Milevsky and Young...

This research studies the propensity of individuals to violate implications of expected utility maximization in allocating retirement savings within a compulsory defined contribution retirement plan. The paper develops the implications and describes the construction and administration of a...

Financial regulators are weighing up the effectiveness of different templates for communicating investment risk to retirement savers since welfare depends on comprehension of risk information. We compare nine standard risk presentations using a discrete choice experiment where subjects choose...

Financial regulators are weighing up the effectiveness of different templates for communicating investment risk to retirement savers since welfare depends on comprehension of risk information. We compare nine standard risk presentations using a discrete choice experiment where subjects choose...

: 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...

In Australia, pension fund trustees choose investment managers on behalf of members. We investigate the structure and performance of delegated investment choice in the Australian retirement incomes sector. We find that funds where trustees employ many managers generate higher risk-adjusted...