This article calls attention to the Department of Labor's imposition of the “prudent investor rule” on financial advisers to retirement savers. The article also canvasses the customary role of an investment policy statement in promoting compliance with the prudent investor rule by...

Assuming the loss aversion framework of Tversky and Kahneman (1992), stochastic investment and labour income processes, and a path-dependent fund target, we show that the optimal investment strategy for defined contribution pension plan members is a target-driven ‘threshold' strategy, whereby...

The paper deals with the question of whether it is possible to combine the insights and recommendations of optimal individual lifecycle investing with the proven gains of defined benefit pension funds. These gains primarily stem from cost efficiency and (intergenerational) risk sharing. We...

The trend towards eliminating defined benefit (DB) pension plans in favour of defined contribution (DC) plans implies that increasing numbers of pension plan participants will bear the risk that final realized portfolio values may be insufficient to fund desired retirement cash flows. We compare...

This paper examines how workers allocated their contributions and assets in their employer-sponsored retirement savings plans within the TIAA system over the 2012 to 2018 period. Consistent with previous research, we find that Lifecycle funds, an auto-diversified target-date fund with an...

This paper investigates retirees' optimal purchases of fixed and variable longevity income annuities using their defined contribution (DC) plan assets and given their expected Social Security benefits. As an alternative, we also evaluate using plan assets to boost Social Security benefits...

The central issue of this paper is analysis and resulting proposals to help unsophisticated pension participants achieve pension portfolios that match their level of risk aversion when there is a large amount of unexplained heterogeneity in risk aversion. Target date funds are commonly used as...

We investigate inattention on the part of pension plan participants using a novel dataset covering savings in Sweden's Premium Pension System, data that permit direct comparison of the investment behaviors of pension and retail mutual fund investors. Unlike retail mutual fund investors, pension...

The funding ratio is a financial indicator to measure the viability of pension funds. The paper analyzes how Swiss occupational pension funds' technical discount rate and asset allocation are related to the funding ratio. The paper shows that funds with weaker funding ratios apply higher rates...