Many, if not most, individuals cannot be regarded as ‘intelligent consumers’ when it comes to understanding and assessing different investment strategies for their defined contribution pension plans. This gives very little incentive to plan providers to improve the design of their pension...

This paper examines the advantages and disadvantages of non-financial defined contribution (NDC) pension plans relative to financial defined contribution (FDC) pension plans. It also shows how an NDC outcome can be replicated in a FDC framework.

We use a case study of a pension plan wishing to hedge the longevity risk in its pension liabilities at a future date. The plan has the choice of using either a customised hedge or an index hedge, with the degree of hedge effectiveness being closely related to the correlation between the value...

The different types of estimators of rational expectations models are surveyed. A key feature is that the model's solution has to be taken into account when it is estimated. The two ways of doing this, the substitution and errors-in-variables methods, give rise to different estimators. In the...

This paper analyses the international equity holdings of a large panel of UK pension funds. We find considerable evidence of market timing activity, as illustrated by the funds' decision to scale back their investments in the US stock market during the 1990s. To explain this we model portfolio...

Using a data set containing 364 UK pension funds’ asset holdings, this paper provides a systematic investigation of the performance of managed portfolios across multiple asset classes. We find surprisingly little cross-sectional variation in the ex-post average performance across the UK...

The different types of estimators of rational expectations models are surveyed. A key feature is that the model′s solution has to be taken into account when it is estimated. The two ways of doing this, the substitution and errors‐in‐variables methods, give rise to different estimators. In...

Using a data set on more than 300 U.K. pension funds' asset holdings, this article provides a systematic investigation of the performance of managed portfolios across multiple asset classes. We find evidence of slow mean reversion in the funds' portfolio weights toward a common, time-varying...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of key issues in the governance of defined contribution pension schemes, with a focus on investment matters, and to recommend best practices. Design/methodology/approach – The paper draws on the results of an online survey of the...