This paper explores the application of contingent claims analysis (CCA) to two quot;hotquot; issues in life-cycle finance: (1) investing for retirement and (2) deciding when, if ever, to switch careers. Participants in individual retirement accounts do not have the time or the knowledge to make...

Most defined contribution pension plans pay benefits as lump sums, yet the US Treasury has recently encouraged firms to protect retirees from outliving their assets by converting a portion of their plan balances into longevity income annuities (LIA). These are deferred annuities which initiate...

The changing social, financial and regulatory frameworks, such as an increasingly aging society, the current low interest rate environment, as well as the implementation of Solvency II, lead to the search for new product forms for private pension provision. In order to address the various...

Economists have long been puzzled by the low demand for life annuities. To shed new light on this puzzle, we study payout choices in the Oregon Public Employees Retirement System, where each retiree must choose between a lump sum and a life annuity. Notably, the average life annuity we study is...

We analyze the long-standing “annuity puzzle” through the lens of behavioral economics. We provide novel evidence that lessens the extent of the puzzle and shed some additional light on the real drivers of the decision to annuitize. Last, we discuss the policy implications of our findings

We derive an expression for the lifetime ruin probability (LRP), defined as the probability a fixed consumption plan will deplete an investment portfolio prior to a retiree's stochastic time of death, assuming the investment return driving the portfolio obeys a jump-diffusion process. This is in...

Inflation for retirees is different from, and mostly higher than, the macroeconomic (average) inflation rate for the entire population. In the U.S. for example, the Consumer Price Index for the Urban population (CPI-U) calculated and reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) has a lesser...

This paper develops a general continuous-time framework for defining the optimal corporate pension policy for defined benefit (DB) plans in the presence of PBGC insurance. Interactions between the firm's optimal investment and financing policies and the optimal portfolio strategy for DB plans...

A simulation investigation of the effect of default insurance on the optimal equity allocation and deficit spread period of a model defined benefit pension scheme is performed, using the old and new frameworks of the Pension Protection Fund in the U.K. as a starting point. The old default...

We propose an optimization criterion that yields extraordinary consumption smoothing compared to the well known results of the life-cycle model. Under this criterion we solve the related consumption and investment optimization problem faced by individuals with preferences for intertemporal...