Socio-economic differences in longevity have fuelled a debate whether pension systems have a regressive bias favouring groups with a high life expectancy. We show that the distributional implications of such pooling depend critically on the benefit profile across age/time, which in turn is...

We conduct a neutral-context laboratory experiment to systematically investigate the role of the hit-by-bus concern in explaining the annuitization puzzle: the low rate of retirement-asset annuitization relative to the predictions of standard models. We vary endowed asset (annuity vs. stock of...

When entering retirement most people face the decision whether they would like their defined contribution account balance paid as a lump sum or to annuitize the amount. The fact that people tend to choose the lump sum even if economic reasons suggest not to is called the annuity puzzle. In a...

We examine the daily activity and performance of a large panel of individual investors in Sweden's Premium Pension System. We find that active investors earn higher returns and risk-adjusted returns than inactive investors. A performance decomposition analysis reveals that most of the...

Little in the scholarly economics literature is directed specifically to stable value funds, although they occupy a leading place among retirement investment vehicles. They are offered in almost half of all defined contribution plans in the USA, with more than $800 billion dollars worth of...

This article provides a stylized framework to assess alternative institutional designs for investment regulation, in the context of mandatory defined contribution pension fund systems with individual accounts and competition among managers. We illustrate short-term, long-term and competitive...