This paper calculates the effect that introducing risk-sharing during either retirement or the working life would have on public sector pension liabilities. We begin by considering the introduction of a variable annuity for the retirement phase, modeled on the Wisconsin Retirement System, in...

In this paper, we use financial valuation techniques to measure the unfunded liabilities associated with the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC) single-employer pension insurance program. This is an alternative approach to the calculations of expected future PBGC payouts in the PBGC...

High volatility and high beta stocks tilt strongly to small, unprofitable, and growth firms. These tilts explain the poor absolute performance of the most aggressive stocks. In conjunction with the well documented inability of the Fama and French three-factor model to price small growth stocks,...

Ferson, Sarkissian and Simin (2003) warn that persistence in expected returns generates spurious regression bias in predictive regressions of stock returns, even though stock returns are themselves only weakly autocorrelated. Despite this fact a growing literature attempts to explain the...

This article considers why housing market conditions, including the ratio of buyers to sellers, expected time-to-sale and transaction prices are sensitive to fundamentals. These high sensitivities result from feedback: market participants optimally respond to shocks in a manner that amplifies a...

It is well known that the funding status of state and local government defined benefit pension plans, as measured by the accounting methodology prescribed by the Governmental Accounting Standards Board (GASB), improves when the plans take on more investment risk. This paper documents several...

In April of 2013, the Pension Research Council of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania convened a Technical Review Panel, comprising ten experts whose task it was to review the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation’s (PBGC) Pension Insurance Modeling System (PIMS), including...

Profitability, measured by gross profits-to-assets, has roughly the same power as book-to-market predicting the cross section of average returns. Profitable firms generate significantly higher returns than unprofitable firms, despite having significantly higher valuation ratios. Controlling for...