A simulation approach is used to investigate how various investment strategies affect the ability of retirees to spend at a desired level up until death. Retirees are assumed to maintain all investment and longevity risk, and also have access to a government-sponsored and means tested Age...

Poor financial market returns and low long-term real interest rates in recent years have created challenges for the sponsors of defined benefit pension schemes. At the same time, lower payroll tax revenues in a period of high unemployment, and rising fiscal deficits in many advanced economies as...

Is an assumption of bounded rationality needed to explain Social Security and other mandatory pension plans? In this contribution we argue that when rational agents hold inconsistent expectations such programs may be justified. Two of the features that distinguish Social Security and many other...

Using micro-data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey this paper examines the relationship between the gender gap in financial literacy and the gender gap in pension savings amongst non-retired adults aged 18-64 in 2018. A simple theoretical model is...

There are two stylised facts, namely weak demand for life-annuities and flat age-wealth profile that contradict the life-cycle hypothesis. In this paper we design a theoretical framework, which combines plausible arguments, which have been put forward in the literature to reconcile theory with...

How might retirees consider deploying the retirement assets accumulated in a defined contribution pension plan? One possibility would be to purchase an immediate annuity. Another approach, called the 'phased withdrawal' strategy in the literature, would have the retiree invest his funds and then...

We employ a life-cycle model with income risk to analyze how tax-deferred individual accounts affect households' savings for retirement. We consider voluntary accounts as opposed to mandatory accounts with minimum contribution rates. We contrast add-on accounts with carve-out accounts that...

This paper presents new evidence on how the annuitization decision is affected by changes in the annuity's value. We take advantage of an unprecendented change in policy, which in 2004 moderated the super-mandatory Swiss occupational pension scheme: The 20 percent reduction in the rate at which...

We employ a life-cycle model with income risk to analyze how tax-deferred individual accounts affect households' savings for retirement. We consider voluntary accounts as opposed to mandatory accounts with minimum contribution rates. We contrast add-on accounts with carve-out accounts that...