We study the time-consistent investment and contribution policies in a defined benefit stochastic pension fund where the manager discounts the instantaneous utility over a finite planning horizon and the final function at constant but different instantaneous rates of time preference. This difference, which can be motivated for some uncertainties affecting payoffs at the end of the planning horizon, will induce a variable bias between the relative valuation of the final function and the previous payoffs and will lead the manager to show time-inconsistent preferences. Both the benefits and the contribution rate are proportional to the total wage of the workers that we suppose is stochastic. The aim is to maximize a CRRA utility function of the net benefit relative to salary in a bounded horizon and to maximize a CRRA final utility of the fund level relative to the salary. The problem is solved by means of dynamic programming techniques, and main results are illustrated numerically.

Analyses of pension funding effects on economic growth should differentiate between ‘carve-out’ pension privatization in Latin America and Eastern Europe and typical ‘add-on’ pension funding in Western Europe and North America. We find no evidence that pension privatization in Latin America and Eastern Europe was associated with higher economic growth. The result is robust across both continents and several alternative econometric specifications. Positive growth effects are particularly unlikely in countries resorting to debt-financed privatization. Furthermore, we note the lack of positive pension privatization effects on savings in Eastern Europe, with limited evidence of positive savings effects in Latin America. These findings suggest that cost-containment parametric reforms should be given priority over carve-out pension privatization when considering options for restoring financial sustainability of public Pay-As-You-Go systems.

We examine whether changes in the degree of pension funding affect economic growth. Our sample consists of 54 countries, Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) as well as non-OECD, during 2001–10. We do not find any effect of changes in the degree of funding on growth in the short-run. For the long-run the evidence is mixed. Although a growth model with overlapping observations suggests that there is a positive effect of funding changes on economic growth, we find no effect in a simple cross-sectional model.

This Presidential Address highlights the national problem of inadequate savings for retirement by the current working population. It examines what can be done to restore confidence in long-term savings and, in particular, looks at the contribution that individual actuaries and the Actuarial Profession can make. The Address also examines the origins in the current shortfalls in final salary pension schemes and the lessons to be learned from recent events, before going on to comment on the lessons from the report on Equitable Life by Lord Penrose.

Haberman and Sung (1994) have presented a dynamic model for a defined benefit occupational pension scheme which considered two types of risk: the “contribution rate” and the “solvency” risk. The current paper, extends this work by deriving optimal funding control procedures for determining the contribution rate for the case of a stochastic model with incomplete state information, making use of the separation principle. The stochastic inputs modelled are the investment returns and the benefit outgo.

In this paper, we find explicit expressions for the moments of the fund level and the value of the total contribution when arithmetic or geometric rates of return are modeled by a moving average process of order q and when a proportional control is applied to the contributions. Our approach is based on the bilinear Markovian representation.

The paper extends earlier results by demonstrating that there is an optimal range of values for the period for amortizing valuation surpluses or deficiencies, in the case when there is a one year time delay between fixing a contribution rate and the accounting information about current fund levels. The optimal range is compared for the cases where there is no time delay and there is a one year time delay.