March 2023
17Mar

Longevity, Health and Housing Risks Management in Retirement

By Pierre-Carl Michaud & Pascal St-Amour Annuities, long-term care insurance and reverse mortgages remain unpopular to manage longevity, medical and housing price risks after retirement. We analyze low demand using a life-cycle model structurally estimated with a unique stated-preference survey experiment of Canadian households. Low risk aversion, substitution between housing and consumption and low marginal utility when in poor health explain most of the reduced demand. Bequests motives are found to be a luxury good and play a limited role....

March 17, 2023
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14Mar

UK. DB Pension Risk Transfers May Slow Due to Lack of Liquidity

High interest rates have made it a good time for some defined benefit plan sponsors to transfer pension risk, but a liquidity pinch may be delaying or altogether shutting off the window, according to experts who spoke at PLANADVISER’s virtual DB Summit last week. The interest rate hikes, which the Federal Reserve started about a year ago to try and tame inflation, have brought present liability down for many plans, said Gloria Griesinger, assistant treasurer for global pension investments and...

March 14, 2023
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10Mar

A Leveraged Gender Gap: The Combined Effect of Longevity Risk (Mis)-Perception and Financial Risk-Taking

By Giovanna Apicella & Enrico G. De Giorgi Financial risk and longevity risk are the main risks affecting pension income. This paper analyses gender differences related to how financial risk taking and survival expectations are correlated. We analyse data from the “Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe” (SHARE) database and find a significant gender gap in self-assessed risk tolerance, consistently with previous literature. Moreover, we show that individuals with realistic survival expectations (i.e., survival expectations that are close...

March 10, 2023
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February 2023
07Feb

U.K. Regulators Are Urged to Address Pension Risks After Last Year’s Crisis

British regulators failed to properly monitor the risks created by the derivatives-based investment strategy that upended the U.K.’s pension sector last year, an investment approach that poses a continuing risk to companies if changes aren’t made, according to a U.K. legislative panel. Liability-driven investments, known as LDIs, invest in derivatives that are tied to U.K. government bonds known as gilts. They help pensions match long-term liabilities they have to retirees with less capital than they would need had they owned...

February 7, 2023
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03Feb

US pension funds are on the brink of implosion – and Wall Street is ignoring it

By David Sirota As public officials across America prepare to funnel even more of government workers’ savings to private equity moguls, an alarm just sounded for anyone bothering to listen. It is a warning that Wall Street executives, busy skimming fees off retirement nest eggs, want you to ignore. The longer the warning goes unheeded, however, the bigger the financial time bomb may be for workers, retirees and the governments that pay them. Earlier this month, PitchBook – the go-to news...

February 3, 2023
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January 2023
20Jan

Pension plan sponsors say their plans are risk averse (but their designs say otherwise)

A new survey from Vanguard finds that sponsors of pension plans say they value lower-risk plans, but don’t always succeed in avoiding risk in their plan design. The report suggests that sponsors of plans may have trouble understanding the level of risk they are taking. The survey also found a continuation of the trend showing that pension plan sponsors are continuing to adjust their plans in ways designed to reduce liability and risk. The new report is the fifth in...

January 20, 2023
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18Jan

Investment Risk Minimization and Optimization of Future Pension Plans

By Peter Vodička Thesis is a collection of three papers with several contributions to the optimisation of future pension plans for the long-term savers while minimising their investment risk. Since pillar aim is to improve the transparency of the pension funding, we develop investment strategies for individual savers which are easy to understand whilst at the same time performing optimally, or near optimally. Furthermore, all investment prospects are communicated in real terms. Principal investment strategy introduced in the thesis is called...

January 18, 2023
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11Jan

CDC schemes would have ‘weathered’ market turmoil

Aon said market turbulence would not have had an adverse impact on members’ benefits A ‘well-designed’ collective defined contribution (CDC) scheme would have withstood recent market turmoil, according to Aon. In an update to the firm's Collective DC in adverse markets paper, originally published in October 2020, Aon said an efficient CDC scheme would have been able to resist the financial turbulence in the markets throughout 2021 and 2022, without having a negative impact on members' benefits or their retirement outcomes....

January 11, 2023
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05Jan

UK. A surge in pension risk settlement predicted in 2023

Aon is predicting a surge in UK pension risk settlement in 2023, as the events of 2022 continue to feed through to the market. Martin Bird, senior partner and head of UK Risk Settlement at Aon, said: “While 2022 was one of the busiest years we have seen in the risk settlement market, we have every expectation that 2023 will see it accelerate. We think there will be a focus on full scheme transactions driving significant volumes across the entire...

January 5, 2023
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December 2022
20Dec

US. Pension Risk Transfer Market Keeps Setting Records

The U.S. pension risk transfer market showed no sign of slowing in the third quarter of 2022, as market activity continues to reach new levels The year’s first quarter saw $5.3 billion in sales split about evenly between single premium buy-ins and buyouts, according to data from financial industry research organization LIMRA. That mark was 40% higher than 2021’s first quarter and the highest first-quarter result on record. There were no buy-in contracts sold in Q2, but single premium buyout sales...

December 20, 2022
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