The paper deals with taxation effects on optimal portfolio rules of de fined contribution (DC) and de fined benefi t (DB) pension funds in a continuous-time setting. Following practice, three tax types are considered: on contributions, investment gains and pensions. We focus on the tax effects...

This paper analyzes the economic cost of Mean-Variance portfolios that involve asset returns which are smoothed. In this situation, variance and covariance of returns will be understated, resulting in sub-optimal allocation. Certainty equivalent loss (CEL), associated with this ‘smoothed'...

In contrast to corporate and institutional investors, single owner-occupiers cannot adequately diversify housing investment risk. Consequently, homeownership should be relatively less likely in places with higher housing investment risk. Using the American Housing Survey, it is documented that...

We study the effect of home equity and indebtedness on financial portfolio choices of Dutch households during the period 2006-2012. Using a large administrative dataset at the household level we estimate how home equity and the outstanding mortgage amount influence the share of liquid assets...

We study the effect of home equity and indebtedness on financial portfolio choices of Dutch households during the period 2006-2012. Using a large administrative dataset at the household level we estimate how home equity and the outstanding mortgage amount influence the share of liquid assets...

I study the history and performance of commercial real estate (CRE) in the pension fund portfolio, showing how many plan sponsors fundamentally changed their approach to CRE investment once underfunding gaps began to emerge in the early and middle 2000s. Several new empirical facts are...

We examine how the Bank of England's quantitative easing (QE) policy during the global financial crisis affected the investment behaviour of insurance companies and pension funds and whether their behaviour was consistent with the operation of the so-called 'portfolio balance channel' that has...

This paper analyses the effects of the ECB's Public sector purchase programme (PSPP) on portfolios of the Eurozone investors. The ECB claims that the PSPP works mainly through the portfolio balance channel when the conditions on the asset markets are changed by the presence of a bidding central...

This paper examines the analytical underpinnings of the standard micro portfolio approach to public debt management (PDM) that aims at minimising longer-term cash-flow based borrowing costs at an acceptable level of risk. The study concludes that two technical key assumptions need to hold for...

Starting from the Merton framework for firm defaults, we provide the analytics and robustness of the relationship between default correlations. We show that loans with higher default probabilities will not only have higher variances but also higher correlations between loans. As a consequence,...