There has been a surge of interest in recent years from defined benefit pension plan sponsors in de-risking their plans with strategies such as “longevity hedges” and “pension buyouts” (Lin et al., 2015). While buyouts are attractive in terms of value creation, they are capital intensive...

Defined-benefit (DB) pension funds, often underfunded, rely on the legal obligation of their sponsor to secure pension rights for individuals.Because that guarantee is risky, ways must be found to secure the pension promises. This paper is the first to identify the optimal pension fund...

Defined-benefit (DB) pension funds, often underfunded, rely on the legal obligation of their sponsor to secure pension rights for individuals. The sponsor guarantee being risky, its riskiness must be hedged to secure the pension promises. This appendix details the implementation of the extended...

We derive the optimal corporate pension portfolio policy in a consolidated setting in the presence of PBGC insurance. The paper's result formalizes the forces of risk shifting and risk management that shape the form of the corporate pension portfolio. As in Rauh (2009), the risk-shifting and...

Defined-benefit (DB) pension funds, which are often underfunded, rely on the legal obligation of their sponsor to secure pension rights. This paper is the first to solve the optimal portfolio choice problem of pension funds taking into account the risk on the sponsor's guarantee, and we show...

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...