Logical Implications of GASB’s Methodology for Valuing Pension Liabilities

It is well known that the funding status of state and local government defined benefit pension plans, as measured by the accounting methodology prescribed by the Governmental Accounting Standards Board (GASB), improves when the plans take on more investment risk. This paper documents several lesser known logical implications of the GASB methodology. In particular, I show that GASB accounting is susceptible to the “Yogi Berra fallacy,” under which a pizza is less filling when sliced into fewer pieces: GASB gives different “valuations” for the exact same assets and liabilities when they are partitioned differently among plans. Moreover, the marginal valuation of assets can be negative under GASB. In such cases a plan can improve its GASB funding status literally by burning money. Finally, I show that GASB’s methodology is exactly equivalent to fairly valuing plan liabilities, but accounting for stocks at more than twice their traded prices, and further crediting a plan an additional dollar for each dollar of stock that it intends to buy in the future.

Economic and Financial Approaches to Valuing Pension Liabilities

Financial economics holds that payment streams should be valued using discount rates that reflect the cash flows’ risks. In the case of pension liabilities, the appropriate discount rate for a pension fund’s liabilities is the expected rate of return on a portfolio that would be held under a liability-driven investment policy. The valuation of defined benefit (DB) pension obligations involves choices revolving around deciding 1) what future benefit payments to recognize today (i.e., which liability concept to use); and 2) from whose point of view to value the liabilities. Moving towards modeling the distribution of future liabilities using a “risk-neutral” framework would allow for calculating the present value of the future liabilities more accurately. This would provide policymakers with information more relevant for decisionmaking, and it would also permit easier communication of the risks facing the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation’s PIMS model via a single univariate statistic

The Other Side of Value: Good Growth and the Gross Profitability Premium

Profitability, as measured by gross profits-to-assets, has roughly the same power as book-to-market predicting the cross-section of average returns. Profitable firms generate significantly higher average returns than unprofitable firms, despite having, on average, lower book-to-markets and higher market capitalizations. Controlling for profitability also dramatically increases the performance of value strategies, especially among the largest, most liquid stocks. These results are difficult to reconcile with popular explanations of the value premium, as profitable firms are less prone to distress, have longer cashflow durations, and have lower levels of operating leverage, than unprofitable firms. Controlling for gross profitability explains most earnings related anomalies, as well as a wide range of seemingly unrelated profitable trading strategies.

Policy Options for State Pension Systems and Their Impact on Plan Liabilities

We calculate the present value of state pension liabilities under existing policies, and separately under policy changes that would affect pension payouts including cost of living adjustments (COLAs), retirement ages, and buyout schedules for early retirement. Liabilities if plans were frozen as of June 2009 would be $3.2 trillion if capitalized using taxable municipal curves, which credit states for a possibility of default in the same states of the world as general obligation debt, and$4.4 trillion using the Treasury curve. Under the typical actuarial method of recognizing future service and wage increases, liabilities are $3.6 trillion and$5.2 trillion using municipal curves and Treasury curves respectively. Compared to $1.8 trillion in pension fund assets, the baseline level of unfunded liabilities is therefore around$3 trillion under Treasury rates. A one percentage point reduction in COLAs would reduce total liabilities by 9‐11%, implementing actuarially fair early retirement could reduce them by 2‐5%, and raising the retirement age by one year would reduce them by 2‐4%. Even relatively dramatic policy changes, such as the elimination of COLAs or the implementation of Social Security retirement age parameters, would leave liabilities around $1.5 trillion more than plan assets under Treasury discounting. This suggests that taxpayers will bear the lion's share of the costs associated with the legacy liabilities of state DB pension plans.

Financial Valuation of PBGC Insurance with Market-Implied Default Probabilities

In this paper, we use financial valuation techniques to measure the unfunded liabilities associated with the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC) single-employer pension insurance program. This is an alternative approach to the calculations of expected future PBGC payouts in the PBGC exposure reports. The PBGC insurance is akin to an exchange option, a financial instrument that allows a party to exchange one risky asset for another. Calculating the value of this option for each PBGC-covered plan provides a measure of the fair market price of the PBGC guarantee that is consistent with the finance principles of risk-neutral pricing. That is, the market valuation method reflects the fact that bad outcomes tend to coincide with times when losses are particularly painful. The valuation we perform also reflects the fact that PBGC insurance is triggered only in the case of bankruptcy by drawing on the default probabilities implied by the credit ratings of insured plans. Under the baseline parameters, the PBGC’s insurance of the unfunded liabilities has a financial value of $358 billion, net of the estimated present value of PBGC premiums

Trend following, risk parity and momentum in commodity futures

We show that combining momentum and trend following strategies for individual commodity futures can lead to portfolios which offer attractive risk adjusted returns which are superior to simple momentum strategies; when we expose these returns to a wide array of sources of systematic risk we find that robust alpha survives. Experimenting with risk parity portfolio weightings has limited impact on our results though in particular is beneficial to long–short strategies; the marginal impact of applying trend following methods far outweighs momentum and risk parity adjustments in terms of risk-adjusted returns and limiting downside risk. Overall this leads to an attractive strategy for investing in commodity futures and emphasises the importance of trend following as an investment strategy in the commodity futures context

Technical Review Panel for the Pension Insurance Modeling System (PIMS)

In April of 2013, the Pension Research Council of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania convened a Technical Review Panel, comprising ten experts whose task it was to review the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation’s (PBGC) Pension Insurance Modeling System (PIMS), including inputs, outputs, and model assumptions. The review was intended to provide a formal evaluation of the technical adequacy of the model by outside experts. Each expert participating on the Technical Panel was asked to review background material (see References) and focus on a particular aspect of the PIMS model. The list of panelists and topics was developed by the Council in discussion with the Social Security Administration (SSA). This report and the appended papers herein from our Technical Panel comprise the Final Report under this project. The Panel’s key findings may be summarized as follows: (1) The PIMS models are an important and valuable tool in modeling the Agency’s liability risk. To the best of our knowledge, there is no other model that can do a comparable job. (2) Nevertheless, some improvements could be integrated in the Agency’s approach to modeling. Those deserving highest priority attention in the experts’ view are the following: (a) Incorporating systematic mortality risk (i.e., treat mortality and longevity as stochastic variables); (b) Including new asset classes increasingly found in defined benefit plan portfolios (e.g., commercial real estate, private equity funds, infrastructure, hedge funds, and others); (c) Developing a more complex model for the term structure of interest rates; and (d) Incorporating an option value approach to pricing the insurance provided. (3) The Agency could also do more to communicate the range of uncertainty and potential for problems associated with the PBGC’s financial status. This could include additional information including the Conditional Value at Risk (CVaR), and perhaps an ‘intermediate,’ ‘optimistic,’ and ‘pessimistic’ set of projected outcomes, as well as the expected ‘date of exhaustion’ for assets backing pension benefits insured by the PBGC.Social Security Administrationhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/102265/1/wp290.pd