February 2017

04Feb

Strategic and Tactical Allocation to Commodities for Retirement Savings Schemes

By Theo Nijman & Adrianus Petrus Swinkels We examine whether the variance risk of investment portfolios of pension schemes investing in traditional asset classes can be reduced by extending the set of traditional investment opportunities with commodities. We investigate the economic and statistical significance of shifts in the strategic (three year), myopic (quarterly), and tactical (quarterly rebalancing) mean-variance frontier for pension schemes with a fixed liability portfolio. We find substantial differences in optimal strategic allocations for pension schemes with nominal...

February 4, 2017
Articles, Investing, Savings,
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03Feb

Risky Choices: Simulating Public Pension Funding Stress with Realistic Shocks

By James Farrell, Daniel Shoag State and local government pension funds in the United States collectively manage a very large and diverse pool of assets to meet the even large sum of accrued liabilities. Recent research has emphasized that widely-used accounting practices, like matching discount rates to expected asset returns, understate the market value of these liabilities. Less work has explored the risks inherent in existing diverse set asset allocations, and the accounting practices used by most state and local...

February 3, 2017
Articles, Investing, Savings, ,
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03Feb

Defined ambition pensions – Have the Dutch found the golden mean for retirement savings?

By Erik Schouten & Thurstan Robinson In February 2012, the UK minister for pensions proposed that companies should perhaps be able to provide a new type of pension – Defi ned Aspiration pensions or Defi ned Ambition (DA) pensions, as they are called in the Netherlands. In this article, we take a closer look at DA pensions, examining the Dutch experiences to date with the introduction of DA pensions . We look at what DA pensions have to offer employers...

February 3, 2017
Articles, Savings, System Sustainability, ,
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03Feb

Beyond Contributory Pensions : Fourteen Experiences with Coverage Expansion in Latin America

By Rafael Rofman, Ignacio Apella and Evelyn Vezza Latin America's population is aging, and many among the growing elderly population are not protected by traditional pension schemes. In response, policy makers have been reevaluating their income protection systems so that between 2000 and 2013, the majority of Latin American countries reformed their social pension schemes to provide near-universal coverage for the elderly. Before this unprecedented wave of reform, most income protection in Latin America was provided through contributory pensions available...

February 3, 2017
Savings, System Sustainability
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03Feb

Market risk analysis for Mexico´s pension funds: an autoregressive approach

By Marissa Martínez and Francisco Venegas The aim of this paper is to analyze the market risk of two types of investment funds, Basic SIEFORE 1 (SB1) and Basic SIEFORE 2 (SB2). To do this, we propose a performance index that will be used in ARIMA-GARCH models and some of its extensions, with the purpose of examining the dynamic behavior of the returns and their volatility on such investment funds. Moreover, the risk premium of both types of funds is...

February 3, 2017
Investing, Savings,
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03Feb

Pensions in Mexico A Long-Term Risk

By Victor M. Soria With the coming of economic globalization, over the last two decades, pre-existing problems in pension systems in practically all the countries of the world have sharpened. On the one hand, with increased life expectancy, the population pyramid now contains a larger number of retired persons and people ofretirement age; the increase in unemployment has lowered the number of contributors to social security systems; and on the other hand, financial liberalization and the economic adjustments brought by globalization...

February 3, 2017
Investing, Savings,
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03Feb

Do Savings Increase in Response to Salient Information about Retirement and Expected Pensions?

By Mathias Dolls, Philipp Doerrenberg, Andreas Peichl and Holger Stichnoth How can retirement savings be increased? We explore a unique policy change in the context of the German pension system to study this question. As of 2004, the German pension authority started to send out annual letters providing detailed and comprehensible information about the pension system and individual expected pension payments. This reform did not change the level of pensions, but only manipulated the knowledge about and salience of expected...

February 3, 2017
Savings,
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03Feb

Saving and taxation in a voluntary pension system : toward an agent-based model

By Balázs Király Mandatory pension systems only partially replace old-age income, therefore the government also operates a voluntary pension system, where savings are matched by government grants. Accounting for the resulting tax expenditure, our models describe the income flow from shortsighted to farsighted workers. 1. In rational models, explicit results are obtained, showing the limited learning of shortsighted workers. 2. In agent-based models, this learning is improved and this raises the shortsighted workers' saving and reduces perverse income redistribution. (more…)

February 3, 2017
Savings, System Sustainability, , ,
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