February 2017

Longevity Risk and Private Pensions

By Pablo Antolin This paper examines how uncertainty regarding future mortality and life expectancy outcomes, i.e. longevity risk, affects employer-provided defined benefit (DB) private pension plans liabilities. The paper argues that to assess uncertainty and associated risks adequately, a stochastic approach to model mortality and life expectancy is preferable because it permits to attach probabilities to different forecasts. In this regard, the paper provides the results of estimating the Lee-Carter model for several OECD countries. Furthermore, it conveys the uncertainty...

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...