This paper examines policies for the decumulation of pension wealth in the Netherlands. It suggests a design framework based on economic theory and international evidence. The central message is that a well-designed pension system has an important – although certainly not exclusive – role...

It is common practice for pension schemes to offer their participants the option to delay benefit claiming until after the normal retirement age and adjust the annual benefit level as a result. This adjustment is often not actuarially neutral with respect to the age at which benefits are...

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...

In this paper we investigate the relation between price impact and trading volume for a sample of stocks listed on the New York Stock Exchange. The parametric VAR-models that have been used in the literature starting with Hasbrouck (1991a, 1991b) impose strong proportionality and symmetry...

In this paper we propose a bivariate model for the trading intensities of two stocks in a particular industry. The model consists of a univariate duration model for the pooled transaction process and a probit-specification for the type of trade. We apply the model to the trading intensities of...

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...