Firm managers of defined-benefit (DB) pension plan sponsors reveal their primary motives — risk-shifting or risk-management — through their assumed expected rates of return (ERRs) on the plan assets. Managers with risk-shifting motives choose high ERRs to exploit flexible internal financing...

This article provides natural hedging strategies for life insurance and annuity businesses written on a single generation or on different generations in the presence of both longevity and interest-rate risks. We obtain closed-form solutions for delta and gamma hedges against cohort-based...

A board’s ability and disposition to monitor management, estimated as Board Co-option, affects the firm’s pension policy. I implement a novel board monitoring measure as the percentage of directors appointed after the CEO assumes office, Board Co-option, and find that as Board Co-option...

U.S. corporate sponsors of defined benefit (DB) pension plans in recent years have been de‐risking by paying premiums to transfer their pension plan assets and liabilities to the balance sheets of third‐party insurers. The passage of the Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act...

For many pension schemes, a shortage of data limits their ability to use sophisticated stochastic mortality models to assess and manage their longevity risk. In this study, we develop a relative model for mortality, which compares the evolution of mortality rates in a sub-population with that...