Decision Making in the Pension Fund Board Room: An Experiment with Dutch Pension Fund Trustees

We ask how pension fund trustees deal with the booms and busts that funds encounter, and to what extent the decisions of pension fund trustees are affected by behavioral biases. We examine these issues by using a vignette-method field experiment among Dutch pension fund trustees. We find that trustees display choices that accord with the phenomenon of loss aversion and that trustees allow their choices to be affected by the forces of social comparison: the reserve position of their fund compared to the position of other funds has a significant influence in choosing a pension fund policy mix.pension funds;finance;governance;behavioral economics

Private Pensions and Inflation

Much of the recent discussion about the relation between pensions and inflation has emphasized the adverse impact that the un-expected rise in inflation has had on pension recipients and on the performance of pension funds. In contrast, the present paper focuses on the way that pensions are likely to evolve in response to the expectation of continued inflation in the future and to the uncertainty about the rate of inflation. The unfortunate effects that occurred when inflation caught pensioners and pension fund managers by surprise should not be confused with an inability to adjust to future conditions, even uncertain future conditions. As I shall explain, the persistence of a high rate of inflation is likely to increase the share of total saving that goes into private pensions. Since the tax treatment of pension contributions allows individuals to save in this way for retirement on the same terms that they would under a consumption tax,' the existence of the private pension system may be one of a few things that prevents the national saving rate from going even lower in the current inflationary environment.

Adaptive Index Buffer

With rapidly increasing datasets and more dynamic workloads, adaptive partial indexing becomes an important way to keep indexing efficiently. During times of changing workloads, the query performance suffers from inefficient tables scans while the index tuning mechanism adapts the partial index. In this paper we present the Adaptive Index Buffer. The Adaptive Index Buffer reduces the cost of table scans by quickly indexing tuples in memory until the partial index has adapted to the workload again. We explain the basic operating mode of an Index Buffer and discuss how it adapts to changing workload situations. Further, we present three experiments that show the Index Buffer at work

Cloudlet-based just-in-time indexing of IoT video

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Does the Indexing of Government Transfers Make Carbon Pricing Progressive?

We analyze both the uses side and the sources side incidence of domestic climate policy using an analytical general equilibrium model, taking into account the degree of government program indexing. When transfer programs such as Social Security are explicitly indexed to inflation, higher energy prices automatically lead to cost-of-living adjustments for recipients. We show results with no indexing, 100 percent indexing, and partial indexing based on our analysis of actual transfer programs. When households are classified by annual income, the indexing of U.S. transfers is not enough to offset the regressive uses side, but when they are classified by annual expenditures as a proxy for permanent income, transfer indexing does offset regressivity across the lowest income groups.

Strange bedfellows? Keyword and conceptual search unite to make sense of relevant ESI in electronic discovery

In the brief history of electronic discovery, the latter part of the twentieth century witnessed the demise of paper by a digital hero that emancipated the content of paper documents with OCR and TIFF. This technology added a third dimension to the realm of 2D paper document review and production that lead to a sea change in discovery methods. By many accounts what we have before us is a three-stage evolution from paper to digital to clustering in order to overcome the problems of volume and complexity of ESI. The intent of this position paper is to describe the development of the digital hero and methodology that is emancipating the content and context of ESI – conceptual search that spans file formats, languages and technique, and includes keyword search on a common, shared index