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...

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...

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...

This paper studies the relationship between fund and provider characteristics, and fund performance using a sample of 4,197 U.K personal pension funds operated by 35 providers over a 30 years' period (1980-2009). The fund performance is measured on an annual basis (short-term) and over the whole...

Expectations for investment returns play an important role in establishing business capital cost and capital structure, as well as influencing individual savings behaviour, risk-taking, and long-term funding of institutional obligations such as pensions. Proper and realistic forecasting makes...

We determine the optimal asset allocation to bonds and stocks using an Annually Recalculated Virtual Annuity (ARVA) spending rule for DC pension plan decumulation. Our objective function minimizes downside withdrawal variability for a given fixed value of total expected withdrawals. The optimal...

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...

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...

In defined contribution (DC) pension schemes, the regulator usually imposes asset allocation constraints (minimum and maximum limits by asset class) in order to create funds with different risk-return profiles. In this article we challenge this approach and show that such funds exhibit erratic...