Life expectancies are rapidly increasing and uncertain in all countries in Europe. To keep pension systems affordable, policy reforms are to be implemented which will encourage individuals to work longer. In this paper we analyze the impact of working and living longer on pension incomes in five...

Life expectancies are rapidly increasing and uncertain in all countries in Europe. To keep pension systems affordable, policy reforms are to be implemented which will encourage individuals to work longer and that adjust pension systems such that if life expectancy increases without adjustments...

Performance persistence studies typically suffer from ex-post conditioning biases. As stressed by Carhart (1997a) and Carpenter and Lynch (1999), standard methods of analysis on a survivorship free sample are subject to look-ahead biases. In this paper, we show how one can easily correct for...

This paper investigates the question whether individual stock momentum in Europe is subsumed by country or industry momentum. We introduce a portfolio-based regression approach, which directly allows to test hypotheses about the existence and relative importance of multiple effects (e.g.,...

This paper tests whether hedging currency risk improves the performance of international stock portfolios. We use a generalized performance measure which allows for investor-dependencies such as different utility functions and the presence of nontraded risks. In addition we show that an...

We study the optimal consumption and portfolio choice problem over an individual's life-cycle taking into account annuity risk at retirement. Optimally, the investor allocates wealth at retirement to nominal, inflation-linked, and variable annuities and conditions this choice on the state of the...

We study the economic importance of time-varying bond risk premia in a life-cycle consumption and portfolio-choice problem for an investor facing short-sales and borrowing constraints. On average, the investor is able to time bond markets only as of age~45. Tilts in the optimal asset allocation...

We rigorously explain the numerical approach used in the above-mentioned paper. The methodology is based on Brandt, Goyal, Santa-Clara, and Stroud (2005) (Review of Financial Studies) and Carroll (2006) (Economics Letters). In addition to combining these numerical techniques, we suggest two...