Recreating Sustainable Retirement


Book Description

The financial crisis and the ensuing Great Recession alerted those seeking to protect old-age security, about the extreme risks confronting the financial and political institutions comprising our retirement system. The workforce of today and tomorrow must count on longer lives and deferred retirement, while at the same time it is taking on increased responsibility for managing retirement risk. This volume explores new ways to think about, manage, and finance longevity risk, capital market risk, model risk, and regulatory risk. The book offers an in-depth analysis of the 'black swans' that threaten private and public pensions around the world such as capital market shocks, surprises to longevity, regulatory/political risk, and errors in modelling, will all have profound consequences for stakeholders ranging from pension plan participants, plan sponsors, policymakers, and those who seek to make retirement more resistant. This book analyzes such challenges to retirement sustainability, and it explores ways to better manage and finance them. Insights provided help build retirement systems capable of withstanding what the future will bring.




Pension Fund Risk Management


Book Description

As pension fund systems decrease and dependency ratios increase, risk management is becoming more complex in public and private pension plans. Pension Fund Risk Management: Financial and Actuarial Modeling sheds new light on the current state of pension fund risk management and provides new technical tools for addressing pension risk from an integr




Pension Economics


Book Description

While not attempting to train readers as professional economists, this book aims to provide a secure grounding in the theory and practice of economics insofar as it deals with pension matters. From reading this book, the user will understand: * The key types of pension scheme * The role of pensions in maximizing individual lifetime welfare * The role of pensions in individual savings and retirement decisions * The role and consequences of the pension plan from the company's viewpoint * The role of pensions in promoting aggregate savings * The role of pensions and retirement in overlapping generations models * The economics of ageing and intergenerational accounting * The social welfare implications of pensions * The lessons of behavioural economics for pensions




Modelling Longevity Dynamics for Pensions and Annuity Business


Book Description

Mortality improvements, uncertainty in future mortality trends and the relevant impact on life annuities and pension plans constitute important topics in the field of actuarial mathematics and life insurance techniques. In particular, actuarial calculations concerning pensions, life annuities and other living benefits (provided, for example, by long-term care insurance products and whole life sickness covers) are based on survival probabilities which necessarily extend over a long time horizon. In order to avoid underestimation of the related liabilities, the insurance company (or the pension plan) must adopt an appropriate forecast of future mortality. Great attention is currently being devoted to the management of life annuity portfolios, both from a theoretical and a practical point of view, because of the growing importance of annuity benefits paid by private pension schemes. In particular, the progressive shift from defined benefit to defined contribution pension schemes has increased the interest in life annuities with a guaranteed annual amount. This book provides a comprehensive and detailed description of methods for projecting mortality, and an extensive introduction to some important issues concerning longevity risk in the area of life annuities and pension benefits. It relies on research work carried out by the authors, as well as on a wide teaching experience and in CPD (Continuing Professional Development) initiatives. The following topics are dealt with: life annuities in the framework of post-retirement income strategies; the basic mortality model; recent mortality trends that have been experienced; general features of projection models; discussion of stochastic projection models, with numerical illustrations; measuring and managing longevity risk.




Global Financial Stability Report, April 2012


Book Description

The April 2012 Global Financial Stability Report assesses changes in risks to financial stability over the past six months, focusing on sovereign vulnerabilities, risks stemming from private sector deleveraging, and assessing the continued resilience of emerging markets. The report probes the implications of recent reforms in the financial system for market perception of safe assets, and investigates the growing public and private costs of increased longevity risk from aging populations.




Pension Revolution


Book Description

Praise for Pension Revolution "When Keith Ambachtsheer puts his keen mind to work on a problem, watch out! Here he exposes today's fragile arrangements for the most serious social dilemma of our times--financing retirement. Then he provides a compelling and powerful set of solutions. His writings are essential reading for all who care about the future of American living standards." --Peter Bernstein, founder and President, Peter L. Bernstein, Inc., and author of Capital Ideas and Against the Gods "This book describes one of the most ingenious inventions in the history of mankind: pension funds offering credible promises about old-age income. It reads like a thriller: how can well-governed pension funds be created in an imperfect world in which mortals wrestle with foibles and moral shortcomings? One of the world's leading experts on pensions searches for the answer--and finds it." --Lans Bovenberg, Scientific Director, Network for Studies on Pensions, Aging, and Retirement, Tilburg University, The Netherlands "Pension Revolution exposes the inadequacies of current pension systems and persuasively makes the case for the fundamental changes that are needed. It is essential reading for both the pension industry and policymakers." --Elizabeth Bryan, Chair, Investment Committee, Unisuper Management PM Ltd, Australia "Most analyses of complicated issues deal with complexity by simplifying or only looking at one piece-part, and, in doing so, provide limited value. In stark contrast, Keith Ambachtsheer boldly wades into the complexity in Pension Revolution to come up with a valuable integrative solution. He is a most welcome revolutionary!" --Roger Martin, Dean, Joseph L. Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto, Canada "We have known Keith for over ten years, and consistently over that time, he has constructively and comprehensively challenged conventional wisdom. He has done this so effectively that many of his initial thoughts have now become universally accepted norms. Such is his energy however that he continues to push the boundaries of pension and investment thinking." --Peter Moon, Chief Investment Officer, Universities Superannuation Scheme Ltd, UK "Pension Revolution not only explains the shortcomings of the existing pension system and the underlying design features that have resulted in the current pension upheaval. It also offers thoughtful and creative suggestions for prospective pension design. A must-read for anyone interested in the future of retirement finance." --James Poterba, Professor of Economics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a member of the TIAA-CREF Board of Trustees




OECD Pensions Outlook 2012


Book Description

This edition looks at pension reform during the crisis and beyond, the design of automatic adjustment mechanisms, reversals of systemic pension reforms in Central and Eastern Europe, coverage of private pension systems and guarantees indefined contribution pension systems.




Issues in Pension Economics


Book Description

In the past several decades, pension plans have become one of the most significant institutional influences on labor and financial markets in the U.S. In an effort to understand the economic effects of this growth, the National Bureau of Economic Research embarked on a major research project in 1980. Issues in Pension Economics, the third in a series of four projected volumes to result from thsi study, covers a broad range of pension issues and utilizes new and richer data sources than have been previously available. The papers in this volume cover such issues as the interaction of pension-funding decisions and corporate finances; the role of pensions in providing adequate and secure retirement income, including the integration of pension plans with social security and significant drops in the U.S. saving rate; and the incentive effects of pension plans on labor market behavior and the implications of plans on labor market behavior and the implications of plans for different demographic groups. Issues in Pension Economics offers important empirical studies and makes valuable theoretical contributions to current thinking in an area that will most likely continue to be a source of controversy and debate for some time to come. The volume should prove useful to academics and policymakers, as well as to members of the business and labor communities.




The Calculus of Retirement Income


Book Description

This 2006 book introduces and develops the basic actuarial models and underlying pricing of life-contingent pension annuities and life insurance from a unique financial perspective. The ideas and techniques are then applied to the real-world problem of generating sustainable retirement income towards the end of the human life-cycle. The role of lifetime income, longevity insurance, and systematic withdrawal plans are investigated in a parsimonious framework. The underlying technology and terminology of the book are based on continuous-time financial economics by merging analytic laws of mortality with the dynamics of equity markets and interest rates. Nonetheless, the book requires a minimal background in mathematics and emphasizes applications and examples more than proofs and theorems. It can serve as an ideal textbook for an applied course on wealth management and retirement planning in addition to being a reference for quantitatively-inclined financial planners.




Governance and Fund Management in the Chinese Pension System


Book Description

The Chinese pension system is highly fragmented and decentralized, with governance standards, pension fund management practices, their regulation and supervision varying considerably both across the funded components of the Chinese pension system and across provinces. This paper describes the key components of the system, highlights the progress made to date and identifies remaining weaknesses, in regard to information disclosure, the governance framework and pension fund management standards.