Maximising with-profit pensions without guarantees

Currently, pension providers are running into trouble mainly due to the ultra-low interest rates and the guarantees associated to some pension benefits. With the aim of reducing the pension volatility and providing adequate pension levels with no guarantees, we carry out mathematical analysis of a new pension design in the accumulation phase. The individual's premium is split into the individual and collective part and invested in funds. In times when the return from the individual fund exits a predefined corridor, a certain number of units is transferred to or from the collective account smoothing in this way the volatility of the individual fund. The target is to maximise the total accumulated capital, consisting of the individual account and a portion of the collective account due to a so-called redistribution index, at retirement by controlling the corridor width. We also discuss the necessary and sufficient conditions that have to be put on the redistribution index in order to avoid arbitrage opportunities for contributors

Transforming public pensions: A mixed scheme with a credit granted by the state

Birth rates have dramatically decreased and, with continuous improvements in life expectancy, pension expenditure is on an irreversibly increasing path. This will raise serious concerns for the sustainability of the public pension systems usually financed on a pay-as-you-go (PAYG) basis where current contributions cover current pension expenditure. With this in mind, the aim of this paper is to propose a mixed pension system that consists of a combination of a classical PAYG scheme and an increase of the contribution rate invested in a funding scheme. The investment of the funding part is designed so that the PAYG pension system is financially sustainable at a particular level of probability and at the same time provide some gains to individuals. In this sense, we make the individuals be an active part to face the demographic risks inherent in the PAYG and re-establish its financial sustainability

COVID-19 in a social reinsurance framework: Forewarned is forearmed

The crisis caused by COVID-19 revealed the global unpreparedness to handle the impact of a pandemic. In this paper, we present a statistical analysis of the data related to the COVID-19 outbreak in China, specifically the infection speed, death and fatality rates in Hubei province. By fitting distributions of these quantities we design a parametric reinsurance contract whose trigger and cap are based on the probability distributions of the infection speed, death and fatality rates. In particular, fitting the distribution for the infection speed and death rates we provide a measure of the effectiveness of a state's action during an epidemic, and propose a reinsurance contract as a supplement to a state's social insurance to alleviate financial costs

The Continuous Sample of Working Lives: improving its representativeness

This paper studies the representativeness of the Continuous Sample of Working Lives (CSWL), a set of anonymized microdata containing information on individuals from Spanish Social Security records. We examine several CSWL waves (2005-2013) and show that it is not representative for the population with a pension income. We then develop a methodology to draw a large dataset from the CSWL that is much more representative of the retired population in terms of pension type, gender and age. This procedure also makes it possible for users to choose between goodness of fit and subsample size. In order to illustrate the practical significance of our methodology, the paper also contains an application in which we generate a large subsample distribution from the 2010 CSWL. The results are striking: with a very small reduction in the size of the original CSWL, we significantly reduce errors in estimating pension expenditure for 2010, with a p value greater or equal to 0.999