It is well known that pension funds in the United States are underfunded even if they achieve their projected 8% rate of return. The scope of pension underfunding increases to an astonishing level when more probable future rates are employed. A reduction in the future rate of return from 8% to...

We examine the presence of short-termism in the asset allocation decisions of U.S. private defined benefit pension plans. We document an inverse U-shaped relationship between a plan's allocation to fixed income securities and its funding ratio, centered on a 80% funding ratio, and show that the...

We use a modified corporate risk management framework (e.g., Froot and Stein, 1998) to understand how inefficient risk sharing between firms and employees leads to aggressive investment policies of defined corporate pensions as well as their declining popularity. For reasonable parameter values,...

I explore the role of corporate social responsibility (CSR) in mitigating managers' opportunistic behavior related to defined benefit (DB) pension plan management. Strong CSR firms tend to engage less in earnings manipulation associated with executive option granting and CFO's pay sensitivity to...

We study the impact of regulations on the investment decisions of a defined benefits pension plan. We assess the influence of ex ante (preventive) and ex post (punitive) risk constraints on the gains to dynamic, as opposed to myopic, decision making. We find that preventive measures, such as...

This paper examines the effect of gainsharing provisions on the selection of a discount rate for a defined benefit pension plan. The paper uses a traditional actuarial approach of discounting liabilities using the expected return of the associated pension fund. A stochastic Excel model was...