The Save More Tomorrow™ (or SMarT) plan has proven effective in raising employee saving rates and appears to be popular among participants and the media. An important question has remained on the minds of economists despite this success: just how close does the prescriptive SMarT plan come to approximating the normative life-cycle/permanent-income consumption rule? That is, does it pay (in a lifetime utility sense) to participate in a SMarT plan? We attempt to provide some rigorous answers to this question by employing a quantitative-theoretic model to perform dynamic welfare analysis, and our results tend to support the SMarT plan as a decent first approximation to the life-cycle/permanent-income rule. We also consider the problem of an altruistic employer seeking to maximize the lifetime utility of employees by appropriately choosing the default SMarT parameters in the face of employee heterogeneity in saving rates and uncertainty about whether they will actually stick with the plan. The employer's problem is augmented to include employee heterogeneity concerning risk taking, and we also consider the possibility that SMarT saving may be met with increased borrowing.

We calculate the risk faced by defined benefit plan providers arising from uncertain aggregate mortality – the risk that the average participant will live longer than expected. First, comparing the widely cited Lee–Carter model to industry benchmarks that are commonly employed by plan providers, we show that these benchmarks appear to substantially underestimate longevity. The resultant understatement of liabilities may reach 12.2% for typical male participants in defined benefit plans and may reach 22.4% for male workers aged 22. Next, we consider consequences for plan liabilities if aggregate mortality declines unexpectedly faster than is predicted by a putatively unbiased projection. There is a 5% chance that liabilities of a terminated plan would be 3.1% to 5.3% higher than what is expected, depending on the mix of workers covered.

In this paper we analyze automatic adjustment factors that can be used to keep the budget of a PAYG pension system balanced when cohort sizes fluctuate. The adjustment factors are defined in a way that is similar to their real-world counterparts and they differ in the relative weight they put on changes in the contribution rate and in the pension level. We show how the internal rate of return of the PAYG system depends on the fluctuations in cohort size and on the choice of the adjustment regime. We find that fluctuations in the cohort size have the smallest impact on the internal rate of return if the relative weight of the adjustment parameters directly corresponds to the length of the retirement period relative to the length of the working period. For reasonable numerical values, this weight is close to the actual choice in the German system.

Many retirees hope to continue earning capital market rewards on their saving while avoiding outliving their funds during retirement. We model a dynamic utility maximizing investor who seeks to benefit from holding both equity and longevity insurance. She is free to adjust her portfolio allocation of her financial wealth as well as of the annuity over time, and she can purchase variable payout annuities any time and incrementally. In this setting, we show that the retiree will not fully annuitize even without bequests; rather, she will combine variable annuities with withdrawals from her liquid financial wealth so as to match her desired consumption profile. Optimal stock exposures decrease over time, both within the variable annuity and the withdrawal plan. Welfare gains from this strategy can amount to 40% of financial wealth, depending on risk parameters and other resources; additionally, many retirees will do almost as well as the fully optimized outcome if they hold variable annuities invested 60/40 in stocks/bonds.

The under-development of existing annuity markets coupled with the secular trend away from traditional pensions towards defined contribution accounts in the U.S. raises significant concerns about the adequacy of retirement income for future retirees. We develop dynamic programming techniques to evaluate the efficacy of policies designed to address this concern by encouraging annuitization. Our analysis suggests that policies providing monetary incentives through the tax code can indeed significantly enhance annuitization among retirees: our central estimates suggest that tax-exemption based policies which have been recently proposed in Congress have the potential to increase annuitization by as much as $50,000 for each retired household, at a relatively modest revenue cost to the government. Similar sized policies based instead on refundable tax credits may be more desirable from both efficiency and distributional perspectives.

This contribution aims at enriching the debate on the priority of unfunded pension rights in the case of a sponsoring firm's bankruptcy. Starting from the idea that pension promises in DB schemes are part of a financial contract between a sponsor and participants to a sponsored pension plan, we argue that plan participants are not ordinary creditors and should be given the same priority as other claimants in the event of underfunding and a sponsoring firm's bankruptcy. We build up a model consistent with this view, which gives room for more participants' involvement in pension fund management. We assume that the sponsoring firm chooses the optimal share of a pension fund deficit that it commits to cover in case of underfunding, while participants choose the contribution rates that maximize their expected utility. We show that two regimes govern the pattern of the relationship between the optimal level of funding chosen by the sponsor and the optimal contribution rates chosen by the plan participants. Allowing plan participants to determine their desired contribution rates gives the entrepreneur the proper incentive for funding the pension plan. In a certain way, our pension contract resembles a cash-balance contract and our model suggests that more security can be given to plan participants in their pension savings by offering them a cash-balance plan which states a priority of unfunded pension rights in case of a firm's bankruptcy.

Future contributions to defined benefit pension plans are a significant cash flow item that can be difficult to estimate. Funding ratios – pension assets relative to pension liabilities – have long been considered important for estimating cash flows needed for current and future pension contributions (Ballester et al., 1998). However, US GAAP or IFRS funding ratios that companies report in their financial statements may differ from funding ratios used by pension regulators. These regulatory funding ratios may be more useful for predicting future contributions.

We investigate whether US regulatory and GAAP funding ratios are different and whether regulatory funding ratios provide useful information for predicting future contributions. For 3,877 firm years from 1995 through 2002, we observe that regulatory and GAAP funding ratios differ by more than 5% for 73% of our sample. We also find that predictions of future contributions are improved by using regulatory funding ratios in addition to GAAP funding ratios. Our results are relevant to accounting standard setters' ongoing review of pension accounting rules.

Compared with large institutional pension funds, there is relatively little published research on small funds, which are defined in the Australian superannuation legislation as pension funds with less than five members. Small funds account for more than 20% of total pension assets and they are one of the fastest growing sectors and therefore play a significant part in the savings strategy for national retirement income. This paper contributes to the needed research by analysing the more granular audited accounting data collected for the subset of small funds regulated by the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) over the last few years. The analysis provides new insights into the operating costs involved in running the funds, the investment performances and portfolio compositions of Small APRA Funds (SAF).

In a moral-hazard model with multiple tasks, an agent engages in different activities, labelled work, delayed retirement, and work out (investments in longevity). The latter imposes higher effort costs on weekly labor supply, but increases possibilities for life time labor supply. Work out does not affect aggregate output and does therefore not accrue to the benefit of the principal. Second-best incentives for work out are U-shaped in the agent's ability, and so is the effort level supplied by the agent. These theoretical findings are supported by recent empirical evidence on longevity, which is not always monotonically increasing in ability.

The article shows that in markets with “noise”, such as the pension fund manager industry in Mexico, an ample number of competitors may not significantly reduce mark-ups. Utilizing the statistical distribution of the industry's “noise”, the theoretical framework allows for the estimation of the mark-up. The model also indicates that as the number of pension fund managers increases, the mark-up diminishes at a very slow rate. This implies that more participants in the industry will hardly affect prices. The referred hypotheses are confirmed using information of Mexico's pension fund industry. Evidence also indicates that account transfers among pension fund administrators barely respond to price or return considerations, and that switching has not served as a market disciplining tool that would result in lower fees and higher returns for the consumer.

Incomplete and highly fragmented work histories threaten to leave many contributors of the pension schemes in Latin America without the minimum pension guarantee or even without access to the ordinary pension. We propose a methodology to assess this risk, identify vulnerable groups and study potential determinants of the history of contributions using information from the work history records of the social security institutions. We apply this methodology to the largest social security institution of Uruguay, the Banco de Previsión Social (BPS), and show that the majority of contributors to this institution might not comply with the minimum number of years of contribution that is currently required to access an ordinary pension when they reach the retirement age.

The UK's defined benefit pensions industry makes widespread use of pooled investment vehicles which are provided by a large number of fund management groups. In this paper, we provide the first comprehensive performance analysis of these funds. Using data on 734 actively managed pooled funds that had a combined value of just over £400bn at the end of 2007, ranging from UK equity to funds specialising in Pacific Basin equities, our results indicate that the performance of these institutional funds is generally better than those reported in the literature for managers of mutual funds. Nevertheless, with increasing numbers of UK fund managers purporting to be able to provide high alpha products to the UK's beleaguered pensions industry our results do not give us great confidence that the solution to the widespread deficits of the UK's pension fund industry lies in the hands of these active fund managers.

This paper evaluates the macroeconomic and welfare effects of extending the averaging period used to calculate pension benefits in a pay-as-you-go system. It also examines the complementarities between reforms extending the averaging period and those increasing the retirement age under alternative tax policies. The analysis applies a model in the Auerbach-Kotlikoff tradition to the Spanish economy. Extending the averaging period to the entire work life maximizes long-run welfare and limits expenditure pressures at the peak of the demographic shock as much as increasing the retirement age in line with life expectancy. Moreover, during the demographic transition, pension reforms induce intertemporal labor substitution effects that engender aggregate labor cycles.

The main aim of this paper is to analyse the impact of shifting demographics and changes in pension arrangements in a model that includes housing as both an investment asset and a consumption good. We consider the impact on welfare, and on macroeconomic aggregates, of some specific pension reforms. Using a calibrated OLG model with several sources of uncertainty, we find that the impact of ageing and of reform of social security upon the demand for housing and the level of owner occupation is substantial. We find that pension reform has a very significant impact on the demand for, and price of, housing. The interaction between pension reform and housing is a neglected subject and one which the results we present suggest is important.

A pay-as-you-go pension scheme is associated with positive externalities of having children and providing them with human capital. In a framework with heterogeneity in productivity, and stochastic and endogenous investment in fertility and education, we discuss internalization policies associated with child benefits in the pension formula. The second-best scheme displays both a benefit contingent on the contributions of children and a purely fertility-related component.

To maintain their standard of living during retirement, it is often assumed that individuals need to save enough to replace 75–80% of their final pay. This paper develops a replacement rate measure that better corresponds with a replacement of consumption by properly accounting for savings, taxes, and owner-occupied housing. Savings and investment behavior judged by standard analysis to be inadequate is shown to result in high real consumption during retirement relative to pre-retirement consumption. For example, the simulated savings and investment behavior of single individuals in this study results in retirement income of about 60% of final earnings, well below the typical adequacy threshold of 75–80%. However, this corresponds to replacing about 90% of pre-retirement consumption for renters and over 100% for homeowners who have paid off their mortgage.

As part of the pension reform recently approved in Chile, the government introduced a centralized auction mechanism to provide the Disability and Survivors (D&S) Insurance that covers recent contributors among the more than eight million participants in the mandatory private pension system. This paper is intended as a case study presenting the main distortions found in the decentralized operation of the system that led to this reform and the challenges faced when designing a competitive auction mechanism to be implemented jointly by the Pension Fund Managers (AFP). When each AFP independently hired this insurance with an insurance company, the process was not competitive: colligated companies ended up providing the service and distortions affected competition in the market through incentives to cream-skim members, efforts to block disability claims, lack of price transparency, and the insurance contract acting as a barrier to entry. Cross-subsidies, inefficient risk pooling, and regulatory arbitrage were also present. The Chilean experience is relevant since other privatized systems with decentralized provision of this insurance may show similar problems as they mature. A centralized auction mechanism solves these market failures, but also gives raise to new challenges, such as how to design a competitive auction that attracts participation and deters collusion. Design features that were incorporated into the regulation to tackle these issues are presented here.

In this paper, we analyse how national public pension systems can distort intra-EU movements of workers despite the existing totalization/proratization agreement. As a benchmark test, we propose the ‘Lodge Test’ of mobility neutrality: Two identical individuals who swap countries and jobs should receive the same pension claims in either of the two pension systems compared to a situation where each would have stayed at home. Using the Lodge Test, we identify those features of national pension formulae that are systematically mobility distorting and discuss possible remedies.

We investigate the relationship between pension fund governance and investment performance. For this purpose, we develop the Swiss Pension Fund Governance Index (SPGI) which is a standard metric for the governance quality of Swiss pension funds. The empirical analysis is based on a sample of 96 pension funds with total assets of more than CHF 190 billion. We find evidence for governance issues in the area organization and target setting. Our results support the widespread hypothesis of a positive relationship between pension fund governance and investment performance.

We analyse the impact of various pension regimes, as shaped by recent Italian reforms, on retirement age, adequacy issues, and redistribution. We add to the literature on microsimulation by accounting for individuals' reactions to financial incentives when deciding to retire. We find that shifting from a generous defined benefit (DB) system to an actuarially fair notional defined contribution (NDC) system induces individuals, particularly men, to postpone retirement. Voluntary postponement of retirement would grant employees a replacement rate comparable to that obtained in the pre-reform DB regime, while the self-employed experience a substantial reduction in their replacement rate.