Optimal funding and investment strategies in defined contribution pension plans under Epstein-Zin utility

A defined contribution pension plan allows consumption to be redistributed from the plan member’s working life to retirement in a manner that is consistent with the member’s personal preferences. The plan’s optimal funding and investment strategies therefore depend on the desired pattern of consumption over the lifetime of the member. We investigate these strategies under the assumption that the member has an Epstein-Zin utility function, which allows a separation between risk aversion and the elasticity of intertemporal substitution, and we also take into account the member’s human capital. We show that a stochastic lifestyling approach, with an initial high weight in equity-type investments and a gradual switch into bond-type investments as the retirement date approaches is an optimal investment strategy. In addition, the optimal contribution rate each year is not constant over the life of the plan but reflects trade-offs between the desire for current consumption, bequest and retirement savings motives at different stages in the life cycle, changes in human capital over the life cycle, and attitude to risk

On the effects of changing mortality patterns on investment, labour and consumption under uncertainty

In this paper we extend the consumption-investment life cycle model for an uncertain-lived agent, proposed by Richard (1974), to allow for exible labor supply. We further study the consumption, labor supply and portfolio decisions of an agent facing age-dependent mortality risk, as presented by UK actuarial life tables spanning the time period from 1951-2060 (including mortality forecasts). We find that historical changes in mortality produces significant changes in portfolio investment (more risk taking), labour (decrease of hours) and consumption level (shift to higher level) contributing up to 5% to GDP growth during the period from 1980 until 2010

Optimal Portfolio Management for Individual Pension Plans

We explore the various arguments for and against the recommendation that younger households should invest a larger share of their pension wealth in risky assets. The ability of young agents to compensate their financial losses by saving more during their career provides the strongest argument in favour of younger people investing more aggressively in the stock market. Meanreversion in stock returns yields another argument. However, the uninsurability of the risky human capital goes in the opposite direction, together with the imperfect knowledge that young investors have about the distribution of asset returns.dynamic portfolio choice, pension plan, retirement, time horizon

Optimal Portfolio Choice with Annuitization

We study the optimal consumption and portfolio choice problem over an individual's life-cycle taking into account annuity risk at retirement. Optimally, the investor allocates wealth at retirement to nominal, inflation-linked, and variable annuities and conditions this choice on the state of the economy.We also consider the case in which there are, either for behavioral or institutional reasons, limitations in the types of annuities that are available at retirement.Subsequently, we determine how the investor optimally anticipates annuitization before retirement.We find that i) using information on term structure variables and risk premia significantly improves the optimal annuity choice, ii) restricting the annuity menu to nominal or inflation-linked annuities is costly for both conservative and more aggressive investors, and iii) adjustments in the optimal investment strategy before retirement induced by the annuity demand due to inflation risk and time-varying risk premia are economically significant.This holds as well for sub-optimal annuity choices.The adjustment to hedge real interest rate risk is negligible.We estimate that the welfare costs of not taking these three factors into account at retirement are 9% for an individual with an average risk aversion ( = 5).Not hedging annuity risk before retirement causes an additional welfare costs between 1% and 13%, depending on the annuitization strategy implemented at retirement.optimal life-cycle portfolio choice;annuity risk

Nonseparable Preferences and Optimal Social Security systems

In this paper, we consider economies in which agents are privately informed about their skills, which are evolving stochastically over time. We require agents’ preferences to be weakly separable between the lifetime paths of consumption and labor. However, we allow for intertemporal nonseparabilities in preferences like habit formation. We show that such nonseparabilities imply that optimal asset income taxes are necessarily retrospective in nature. We show that under weak conditions, it is possible to implement a socially optimal allocation using a social security system in which taxes on wealth are linear, and taxes/transfers are history-dependent only at retirement. The average asset income tax in this system is zero.Nonseparable Preferences, Social Security

Nonseparable Preferences and Optimal Social Security Systems

In this paper, we consider economies in which agents are privately informed about their skills, which are evolving stochastically over time. We require agents' preferences to be weakly separable between the lifetime paths of consumption and labor. However, we allow for intertemporal nonseparabilities in preferences like habit formation. We show that such nonseparabilities imply that optimal asset income taxes are necessarily retrospective in nature. We show that under weak conditions, it is possible to implement a socially optimal allocation using a social security system in which taxes on wealth are linear, and taxes/transfers are history-dependent only at retirement. The average asset income tax in this system is zero.

Investment, income, incompleteness

The utility-maximizing consumption and investment strategy of an individual investor receiving an unspanned labor income stream seems impossible to find in closed form and very dificult to find using numerical solution techniques. We suggest an easy procedure for finding a specific, simple, and admissible consumption and investment strategy, which is near-optimal in the sense that the wealthequivalent loss compared to the unknown optimal strategy is very small. We first explain and implement the strategy in a simple setting with constant interest rates, a single risky asset, and an exogenously given income stream, but we also show that the success of the strategy is robust to changes in parameter values, to the introduction of stochastic interest rates, and to endogenous labor supply decisions

Consumption inequality and discount rate heterogeneity

Although standard incomplete market models can account for the magnitude of the rise in consumption inequality over the life cycle, they generate unrealistically concave age profiles of consumption inequality and unrealistically less wealth inequality. In this paper, I investigate the role of discount rate heterogeneity on consumption inequality in the context of incomplete market life cycle models. The distribution of discount rates is estimated using moments from the wealth distribution. I find that the model with heterogeneous income profiles (HIP) and discount rate heterogeneity can successfully account for the empirical age profile of consumption inequality, both in its magnitude and in its non-concave shape. Generating realistic wealth inequality, this simulated model also highlights the importance of ex ante heterogeneities as main sources of life time inequality.Postprin