This Issue Brief is the third in a series of Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI) publications based on data collected in 1998 and released in 2002 as the Retirement and Pension Plan Coverage Topical Module of the 1996 Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP). This report completes the series by examining the survey's more detailed questions concerning workers' employment-based r...

We analyse pension reforms for police officers in England and Wales using force-level data. We quantify the impact on overall police pension plan liabilities, examining incidence across police officers, national and local taxpayers. We also examine reforms of retirement rules, especially concerning early retirement on grounds of ill-health. Differences in ill-health retirement across forces are...

This paper considers the asset allocation strategies for members of defined-contribution pension plans with exponential utility when there are three types of asset, cash, bonds and stocks. The portfolio problem is to maximize the expected utility of terminal wealth that uses the plan member’s final wage as a numeraire, in the presence of three risk sources, interest risk, asset risk and wage ri...

This paper studies the time-consistent investment strategy for a defined contribution (DC) pension plan under the mean–variance criterion. Since the time horizon of a pension fund management problem is relatively long, two background risks are taken into account: the inflation risk and the salary risk. Meanwhile, there are a risk-free asset, a stock and an inflation-indexed bond available in th...

This paper aim at studying a mean-variance portfolio selection problem with stochastic salary, proportional administrative costs and taxation in the accumulation phase of a defined contribution (DC) pension scheme. The fund process is subjected to taxation while the contribution of the pension plan member (PPM) is tax exempt. It is assumed that the flow of contributions of a PPM are invested in...

Portfolio construction can become a very complicated problem, as regulatory constraints, individual investor’s requirements, nontrivial indices of risk and subjective quality measures are taken into account, together with multiple investment horizons and cash-flow planning. This problem is approached using a tree of possible scenarios for the future, and an evolutionary algorithm is used to opt...

We examine ill-health retirement of police officers in England and Wales between 2002-3 and 200910. Differences in ill-health retirement rates across forces are statistically related to area-specific stresses of policing and force-specific differences in human resources policies. Reforms to police pension plans – in particular a shift in the incidence of financing ill-health retirement from cen...

This paper uses unique micro data from a Swedish occupational pension plan to study the determinants of annuitization. The data is merged with national administrative data to create a large data set with rich individual background characteristics. The pension can either be withdrawn as a life annuity or during a fixed number of years with a minimum of five years. Low accumulation of assets is s...