Firm managers of defined-benefit (DB) pension plan sponsors reveal their primary motives — risk-shifting or risk-management — through their assumed expected rates of return (ERRs) on the plan assets. Managers with risk-shifting motives choose high ERRs to exploit flexible internal financing...

Insurance companies often follow highly correlated investment strategies. As major investors in corporate bonds, their investment commonalities subject investors to fire-sale risk when regulatory restrictions prompt widespread divestment of a bond following a rating downgrade. Reflective of...

Insurance companies often follow highly correlated investment strategies. As major investors in corporate bonds, their investment commonalities subject investors to fire-sale risk when regulatory restrictions prompt widespread divestment of a bond following a rating downgrade. Reflective of...

This paper uses stochastic simulations on calibrated models to assess the steady state impact of different pension arrangements in an environment where financial markets are less than perfect. Surprisingly little is known about the optimal split between funded and unfunded systems when there are...

We conduct a comprehensive asset pricing analysis for the U.S. property/liability insurance industry using monthly data from 1988 to 2015. We find that state-of-the-art models such as the Fama and French (2015) five-factor model cannot explain the returns of property/liability insurance stocks...

Managing retirement wealth is one of the major financial decisions that individuals face. In this setting, I document a strong negative relationship between stock market returns and annuitization. Using a novel dataset with more than 103,000 actual payout decisions, I find that positive stock...

• We offer the first empirical exploration of fixed indexed annuity returns based upon actual contracts that were sold and actual interest that was credited.• Annuity returns have been competitive with alternative portfolios of stocks and bonds.• Their design has limited the downside...

A shared belief in the financial industry is that markets are driven by two types of regimes. Bull markets would be characterized by high returns and low volatility whereas bear markets would display low returns coupled with high volatility. Modeling the dynamics of different asset classes...

We analyze the impacts of an additional rider which is incorporated in recent retirement planning products. The payoff of these products is linked to the performance of a multi asset investment strategy and includes a minimum interest rate guarantee on the contributions.In addition, the buyer...

Using a novel dataset with over 100,000 actual payout decisions, we investigate the nature of the strong negative relationship between recent stock returns and the annuitization of retirement savings. After controlling for several standard explanations (e.g., wealth effects), we present evidence...