Between 2012 and 2020, U.S. corporate sponsors of defined benefit (DB) pension plans transferred around $100 billion pension obligations for more than one million plan participants to insurance companies using pension risk transfers (PRTs). We model PRT decisions as an option exercise problem...

There has been a surge of interest in recent years from defined benefit pension plan sponsors in de-risking their plans with strategies such as “longevity hedges” and “pension buyouts” (Lin et al., 2015). While buyouts are attractive in terms of value creation, they are capital intensive...

This stochastic simulation analysis compares funding costs and volatilities for private sponsors of traditional defined benefit (DB), pension equity (PE), cash balance (CB), and defined contribution (DC) retirement plans. Plan provisions of equivalent benefit generosity in the different plan...

I study the incentives of the collateral managers who selected securities for ABS CDOs-securitizations that figured prominently in the financial crisis. Specialized managers without other businesses that could suffer negative reputational consequences invested in low quality securities...

I study the history and performance of commercial real estate (CRE) in the pension fund portfolio, showing how many plan sponsors fundamentally changed their approach to CRE investment once underfunding gaps began to emerge in the early and middle 2000s. Several new empirical facts are...

Considering the high volatility generated from the financial crisis of 2008 and low returns in the years 2011, 2013 and 2014, we analyzed the performance of the Chilean Pension Funds. We use Jensen, Sharpe and Treynor indices to evaluate the funds. The comparison is made on a monthly basis for...

Defined-benefit (DB) pension funds, often underfunded, rely on the legal obligation of their sponsor to secure pension rights for individuals.Because that guarantee is risky, ways must be found to secure the pension promises. This paper is the first to identify the optimal pension fund...

Using recovery plan data of 213 underfunded Dutch pension funds for the years 2011, 2012 and 2013, discrete choice models are estimated describing pension funds' choices between three recovery measures: higher contributions, no indexation, and pension cuts. The estimation results suggest,...

Defined-benefit (DB) pension funds, often underfunded, rely on the legal obligation of their sponsor to secure pension rights for individuals. The sponsor guarantee being risky, its riskiness must be hedged to secure the pension promises. This appendix details the implementation of the extended...

This paper examines the valuation effects associated with the incentive structures of different types of institutional investors using the ownership levels of public and private pension funds in a firm. The results suggest that institutional monitoring is associated with valuation effects when...