The growth and popularity of defined contribution pensions, along with the government's increasing attention to retirement plan costs and investment choices provided, make it important to understand how people select their retirement plan investments. This paper shows how employees in a large...

This article calls attention to the Department of Labor's imposition of the “prudent investor rule” on financial advisers to retirement savers. The article also canvasses the customary role of an investment policy statement in promoting compliance with the prudent investor rule by...

The trend towards eliminating defined benefit (DB) pension plans in favour of defined contribution (DC) plans implies that increasing numbers of pension plan participants will bear the risk that final realized portfolio values may be insufficient to fund desired retirement cash flows. We compare...

Are defined contribution (DC) pension funds' capital flows sensitive to performance? We examine pressures from individual account holders who can switch their pension managers. Using novel data on retirement accounts for nearly 10 million individuals, we analyze switching behavior based on the...

In this study, we employ the 2001-2013 Survey of Consumer Finances to examine how prior investment outcomes affect portfolio allocation in defined contribution (DC) plans. Results show that investors with prior gains are more likely to invest all DC plan assets in stocks. Factors such as risk...

This paper investigates retirees' optimal purchases of fixed and variable longevity income annuities using their defined contribution (DC) plan assets and given their expected Social Security benefits. As an alternative, we also evaluate using plan assets to boost Social Security benefits...

The Pension Bene fit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC) registers a preoccupying financial condition since 2002. This paper builds a theoretical framework for defi ning its optimal asset allocation in a continuous-time stochastic world. We first recognize the PBGC 's put seller nature and derive...

A data driven Neural Network (NN) optimization framework is proposed to determine optimal asset allocation during the accumulation phase of a defined contribution pension scheme. In contrast to parametric model based solutions computed by a partial differential equation approach, the proposed...

Pooled annuity products, where the participants share systematic and idiosyncratic mortality risks as well as investment returns and risk, provide an attractive and effective alternative to traditional guaranteed life annuity products. While longevity risk sharing in pooled annuities has...

We analyse the investment performance of a large sample of individuals investing in discretionary retirement savings products offered by a large Australian financial institution. This is of interest from the perspective of market efficiency and the ability of individuals to over or under-perform...