With the passage of the Pension Protection Act of 2006 and the Department of Labor regulation regarding qualified default investment alternatives, automatic enrollment and default investments featuring more equities are likely to become more popular. This analysis compares the investment...

I explore the diversity among pension plans offered to faculty at 52 Canadian universities. Far from displaying homogeneity, I find marked differences between the plans, both in their structure (DB, DC and hybrid) and in the size of the pension benefit from those plans. Using financial...

This paper measures the cost of biased retirement expectations for investors in target-date funds. Using survey data, we show that respondents systematically underestimate their long-run labor participation on average by 4.8 years, with errors having meaningful cross-sectional relationships. We...

We investigate the relationships between measures of financial literacy, applied financial literacy, financial judgment and measures of fluid and crystallised cognitive ability. Given an ageing population and the responsibility for managing savings in retirement, this relationship is of...

We examine the drivers of variable annuity sales and the impact of a proposed regulatory change. Variable annuities are popular retirement products with over $2 trillion in assets in the United States. Insurers typically pay brokers a commission for selling variable annuities that ranges from 0%...

This paper examines the characteristics of three funding strategies for pension plans and analyzes the investment strategies that complement these strategies. Although the primary focus is on defined benefit plans, which include Social Security, it also applies to employees’ defined...

This paper reviews the recent development of the funded pension system in the Russian Federation and considers it role in the context of the overall retirement income system. By describing current OECD practices and policy recommendations and comparing them with the current Russian pension...

A key question in Canada's pensions debate is whether Canadians will be able to maintain their living standards in retirement, and if policy needs to respond to the risk that some will experience painful declines. To date, it has been very difficult to estimate how current trends might affect...

Government-issued longevity bonds would allow longevity risk to be shared efficiently and fairly between generations. In exchange for paying a longevity risk premium, the current generation of retirees can look to future generations to hedge their aggregate longevity risk. There are also wider...