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...

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...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to review the way in which auditing issues have been raised and addressed during the credit crunch and developing global financial crisis. Design/methodology/approach – Analysis is based on a review of the academic auditing literature, regulatory and...

Survivorship risk is a significant factor in the provision of retirement income. Survivor derivatives are in their early stages and offer potentially significant welfare benefits to society. This article applies the approach developed by Dowd et al. (2006), Olivier and Jeffery (2004), Smith...

This paper proposes the use of wavelet methods to estimate U.S. core inflation. It explains wavelet methods and suggests that they are ideally suited to this task. Comparisons are made with traditional Consumer Price Index–based and regression-based measures for their performance in following...