As members of the Australian workforce approach retirement, they are being presented with increased choice in their superannuation investments. With increased choice has come greater personal responsibility for ensuring adequate retirement savings. This paper explores gender differences in superannuation investment choices through a range of interactions with individual demographics and in doing so a gender effect can be further refined than previous research has identified. The data for this paper comes from a survey of members of the Superannuation Scheme for Australian Universities (SSAU).

The paper analyzes the recent pension reform in Germany which increases the normal retirement age by two years. The applied simulation model features a realistic demographic transition, distinguishes three skill classes with different life expectancies and allows individuals to choose their labor supply at the intensive and the extensive margin.

Our simulation results indicate that under the existing pension rules long-run contribution rates and old-age poverty rates will increase considerably. The proposed rise in the normal retirement age will postpone effective retirement by about one year and redistribute towards future cohorts. A stronger delay in effective retirement may be achieved by raising the actuarial adjustment of benefits.

In order to help in designing an accurate pension reform, we determine the resource allocation in an endogenous fertility model that generates an endogenous demographic transition by means of distinguishing between female and male labor. We analyze the problem of the optimal solution and characterize the decentralization of the first best. We show that a pension policy linking pension benefits to the number of children acts as a corrective tax system able to restore both the optimal capital stock and the optimal rate of population growth as a single instrument. We also show that neither a Beveridgean pension scheme nor a Bismarckian one can decentralize the first best.

Debate over superiority of pension funding over pay-as-you-go links notably to the question whether funding improves economic performance sufficiently to generate additional resources to meet the needs of an ageing population. To address this issue, we design a modified Cobb–Douglas production function with pension assets as a shift factor, and investigate the direct link between pension assets and economic growth employing a dataset covering up to 38 countries, using a variety of appropriate econometric methods. We find positive results for both OECD countries and Emerging Market Economies (EMEs), with consistent evidence for a larger effect for EMEs than OECD countries.

This paper deals with solvency requirements for life annuities portfolios and funded pension plans. Particular emphasis is devoted to longevity risk, i.e. the risk arising from uncertainty in future mortality trends. This risk must be faced by insurance companies and pension plans that have guaranteed lifelong payoffs.

Solvency is investigated referring to immediate annuities, and hence the so-called decumulation phase is addressed. To assess solvency, assets are compared with the random present value of liabilities. Several requirements are considered, each leading to a required asset level that must be financed both with premiums (or contributions) and capital allocation.

Public pension funding has recently become a front-burner policy issue in the wake of the financial crisis and given the pending retirement of large numbers of baby boomers. This paper examines the current funding of state and local pensions using a sample of 126 plans, estimating an aggregate funded ratio in 2009 of 78% using GASB accounting methods. Projections for 2010–2013 suggest that some continued deterioration is likely. Funded status can vary significantly among plans, and so the paper explores the influence of four types of factors: funding discipline, plan governance, plan characteristics, and the fiscal situation of the state. Judging the long-term health of plans requires more than just a snapshot of assets and liabilities, and so the paper examines how well plans are meeting their Annual Required Contributions and what factors influence whether they make them. The paper also addresses the controversy over what discount rate to use for valuing liabilities, concluding that using a riskless rate of return could help improve funding discipline but would need to be implemented in a manageable way. Finally, the paper assesses whether plans face a near-term liquidity crisis and finds that most have assets on hand to cover benefits over the next 15–20 years. The bottom line is that, like private investors, public plans have been hit hard by the financial crisis and their full recovery is dependent on the rebound of the economy and the stock market.

We study the complex relationship between financial literacy, retirement planning and trust in financial institutions, using data from the 2010 Bank of Italy Survey on Household Income and Wealth. The impact of financial literacy on retirement planning is a well-established issue in the existing empirical literature; our main contribution is proving that financial knowledge not only impacts retirement planning, but also the decisions of entering a private pension scheme (or devoting the severance pay to a private pension scheme). Adding the consideration of trust poses serious econometric concerns, since both financial literacy and trust in financial institutions are likely to be endogenous and the presence of two endogenous regressors renders the identification of causality very difficult. Our solution is to keep only financial literacy as endogenous and include in our models an exogenous regional indicator of social capital (similar to the one adopted by Guiso et al., 2004), as a proxy for the level of trust between the counterparts of a financial contract in each geographical area. Our main findings show that trust has a positive influence on both the decisions to enter a private pension scheme or to devote the severance pay to a private pension scheme.

In many policy areas it is essential to use the best estimates of life expectancy, but it is vital to most areas of pension policy. This paper presents the conceptual differences between static period and dynamic cohort mortality tables, estimates the differences in life expectancy for Portugal and Spain, and compares official estimates of both life expectancy estimates for Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States for 1981, 2010, and 2060. These comparisons reveal major differences between period and cohort life expectancy in and between countries and across years. The implications of using wrong estimates for pension policy, including financial sustainability, are explored.

Chileans have limited knowledge of the pension system, its rules, and the consequences involved in their personal decisions within it. Using a variation in the household composition – having a pensioner in the household – as an instrument, we show that Chileans with greater knowledge about the pension system are more likely to have additional financial savings, but not within the voluntary pension saving plans offered by the pension system. We find that getting one additional answer right in the pension literacy survey (out of six) generates approximately a 50% additional chance that the individual will save at least in one of the surveyed periods, and a 25% additional chance that the individual will save in both surveyed periods. We also test for evidence that pension literacy affects worker choices regarding their pension savings (what we call active financial behavior). We find that more literate workers are more likely to engage in pension fund type switching and that independent workers are more likely to voluntarily enter the pension system as affiliates if they have greater pension finance literacy. Getting one additional answer right in the pension literacy survey (out of six) increases the probability of pension fund type switching by 20% and the probability of voluntary affiliation to the pension system of self-employed workers by 30%.

We investigate the determinants of interest in reverse mortgages (RM) for a sample of Italian homeowners and find that the majority of individuals belonging to categories identified, on the basis of economic analysis, as the main potential beneficiaries (i.e., women, elderly and ‘house rich–cash poor’ individuals) are, in fact, less likely to express an interest. When allowing for individual characteristics, we find that most results remain robust and notice that risk aversion and negative expectations on one's standard of living after retirement predict higher interest in the product. These results suggest that RM is perceived not so much as an ordinary instrument to achieve a better standard of living, but rather as a remedy against poor consumption.

This paper presents the results from the first study of financial literacy in Finland and explores the relationship between financial literacy and retirement planning in Finland. Finland is an interesting case because countervailing effects may exist: a high level of education might increase financial literacy, while the high provision of social security may decrease it and weaken its relationship with pension planning. The results indicate that the level of financial literacy in Finland is comparatively high, although it is unequally distributed among the population. With respect to pension planning, we find that there is little evidence of a relationship between the three core financial literacy questions and retirement planning; however, a statistically significant and positive relationship exists between retirement planning and an extended measure of financial literacy, consisting mostly of more demanding questions. When we split the sample by gender, we find evidence of a positive relationship between financial literacy and retirement planning among women but not among men. The results indicate that scaling down publicly guaranteed pension benefits may pose a challenge to the less financially literate segment of the population.

This paper empirically examines the strategic asset allocation and the asset/liability issues in the Finnish defined benefit pension funds. The results indicate that there is a relationship between the liability structure and the asset allocation. While pension funds with younger participants have more equity exposure, more mature pension funds have more fixed income investments.

Wide dispersion in asset allocations is also found between the funds. One fund holds its entire portfolio in fixed income securities, whereas other funds have none or only few fixed income holdings. Equity investments also vary dramatically, ranging from 0% to over 70% of the asset allocation. The same applies to investments in a sponsor, real estate investment, and money market investments. A portion of these different asset allocations is explained by the liability structure, but another part remains unexplained. The other variables affecting strategic asset allocation of a pension fund are not obvious, but they could include factors such as regulatory environment, historical reasons, mean-variance optimization instead of ALM, sponsor's own preferences or pension fund's irrationality. Analyzing these factors would be a fruitful topic for further research. Additionally, international comparisons would be a fruitful topic for further investigation.

This paper provides a detailed examination of individuals' active participation in a new public and mandatory defined contribution pension system. The new pension system was launched in the fall of 2000 and entitles Sweden's workforce of 4.4 million individuals to invest part of their individual pension account in mutual funds. Our findings show that the system is associated with a reversed investment behavior compared with studies of 401(k) plans; that is, individuals tend to make their own investment decisions. Contrary to US studies, we also find that women and younger individuals are more likely than men and older individuals to make an active investment decision.

Recent research has suggested that companies with defined benefit (DB) pensions are sometimes significantly misvalued by the market. This is because the measures of pension cost and pension net liabilities embedded in financial statements can provide a very misleading picture of pension finances, if taken at face value. The more pertinent information on pension finances is relegated to footnotes, which may not receive much attention from portfolio managers. Dramatic swings in the financial conditions of large DB plans around the turn of the decade focused attention on pension accounting practices, and growing dissatisfaction with current accounting standards has prompted the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) to launch a project revamping DB pension accounting. Arguably, the increased attention should have made investors wise to the informational problems, thereby eliminating systematic mispricing in recent years. We test this proposition and conclude that investors continued to misvalue DB pensions, inducing sizable valuation errors in the stock of many companies. Our findings suggest that FASB's current reform efforts could substantially aid the market's ability to value firms with DB pensions.

Most state and local retirement plans strive for full funding, at least by actuarial standards. Funding measured at market values fluctuates and often falls short. In a model where most taxpayers hold debt and face intermediation costs, returns on pension assets are less than taxpayers’ costs of borrowing. Hence, zero pension funding is optimal. Also, unfunded pension promises are properly discounted at a rate strictly greater than the government's borrowing rate. Funding can still be in taxpayers’ interests if legal enforcement problems make unfunded pensions risky for employees, but except in special cases, the optimal funding ratio is less than 100%.

Like most countries, China faces a rapidly aging population and a looming social security crisis. Prefunding and unifying a fragmented system are at the heart of the government's projected reforms that are intended to prevent this crisis. The Chinese plan to set up individual accounts to deal with these problems is retarded by three key factors:

1 transition costs must be covered in any move toward prefunding, and the Chinese government is still trying to figure out how to accomplish this;

2 the current social security system is characterized by fragmentation and decentralized administration, which lead to principal–agent/ moral hazard issues that make it more difficult to cover transition costs, decrease early retirement and increase compliance;

3 the funds that have accumulated have not been invested in diversified portfolios by competitive management and have not earned a high rate of return.

This paper focuses on these three problems as well as the complex interactions between pension, financial market and state-owned enterprise (SOE) reform. We summarize the bold steps that the government has announced during second half of 2001 to link pension, financial market and SOE reform.

The raison d'être of wage-indexed defined benefit pension funds is to provide insurance against standard-of-living risk after retirement, based on intergenerational risk sharing. Pension funds necessarily have to accept mismatch risk in providing this kind of insurance. Mismatch risk taken by the pension fund is risk for the fund's stakeholders. We combine the value-based approach and the method of generational accounting to analyze the economic value of the stakes of the different generations and the issue of who gains and who loses (transfers of value between generations) from alternative funding and indexation policies. Rules concerning the allocation of a funding surplus or funding shortage in particular are decisive to the direction and to the size of transfers of value between stakeholders. We put forward two criteria to evaluate alternative policies employed by pension funds: the funding policy and allocation rules must give an ex ante fair compensation for risk taken by generations and the sustainability of a pension plan must be checked with respect to ex post redistributive effects for current and future generations. Value-based generational accounting provides a tool for testing a pension fund policy for these two criteria.

We analyze the optimal balance between social security taxation and private saving in the provision of retirement income in dynamically efficient economies, a question at the center of policy debates in Europe and the United States. We consider the relative importance for this question of the return to capital, the internal return of the pay-as-you-go system, and the variabilities and correlation (or independence) of labor earnings and the capital return. We analyse these influences theoretically in the context of a two-period, overlapping generations model with uncertainty. We use a new method to calibrate the model using annual data on GDP per worker and the total real return on equities, from 1950 to 2002, from which we infer the stochastic characteristics of lifetime labor income and the return to lifetime savings in the US, UK, France and Japan. We obtain a range of optimal, steady-state values of the social security tax and the rate of lifetime savings. When the relative rate of risk aversion is assumed to be 2.5, the computed optimal tax varies from 5% in the United States to 22% in Japan. France is similar to Japan, and the UK is in between.

This paper examines the rationale, nature and financial consequences of two alternative approaches to portfolio regulations for life insurers and pension funds, namely prudent person rules and quantitative portfolio restrictions. The argument draws on the financial-economics of investment and the differing characteristics of institutions' liabilities, as well as evidence drawn from major OECD countries. The overall conclusion is that prudent person rules are superior to restrictions, particularly for pension funds, except in certain circumstances that may hold temporarily in emerging market economies.

This paper evaluates the overall investment performance of Australian pension funds by examining the determinants of risk-adjusted performance, and the relationship between risk, returns, and expenses. Using quarterly return data for 225 pension funds comprising 68% of total prudentially regulated pension fund assets, we find significant differences exist across fund types. On both a net return and risk-adjusted performance basis, not-for-profit funds significantly outperformed for-profit funds over the seven years to June 2002. We suggest that the performance difference is consistent with the hypothesis that agency costs in for-profit funds (due to non-representative trustee board structures and potential board member conflicts of interest) are greater than agency costs in not-for-profit funds (with representative trustee boards).