This Working Paper should not be reported as representing the views of the IMF. The views expressed in this Working Paper are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent those of the IMF or IMF policy. Working Papers describe research in progress by the author(s) and are published to elicit comments and to further debate. The present paper reviews key issues in pension design and pe...

The German Retirement Saving Act instituted a new funded system of supplementary pensions coupled with a general reduction in the level of state pay-as-you-go old-age pensions. In order to qualify for tax relief, the providers of supplementary savings products must offer a guarantee of the nominal value at retirement of contributions paid into these saving accounts. This paper explores how this...

We report on unrestrained molecular dynamics simulations of an RNA tetramer binding to a tetra-nucleotide overhang at the 5'-end of an RNA hairpin (nicked structure) and of the corresponding continuous hairpin with Na+ as counterions. The simulations lead to stable structures and in this way a structural model for the coaxially stacked RNA hairpin is generated. The stacking interface in the coa...

Safe and liquid assets, such as Treasury bonds, are money-like instruments that command a convenience yield. We analyze this in a search model of two assets that differ in liquidity and safety. In contrast to the reduced-form approach, which puts the safe and liquid asset in utility function, we explicitly model investors’ trading needs and the trading friction. One new insight from this approa...

Investor reaction to mutual fund performance conditions the behavior of mutual fund managers and fund complexes and thus has widely reaching ramifications for the trading of assets worldwide. In particular, the mutual funds literature has long argued that convexity in the money flow-performance relation influences risk-taking by funds. Existing empirical studies, however, largely focus on the a...

Asset allocation is widely recognized as the most fundamental decision in the investment process. Surprisingly little work has been done on examining what drives the asset allocation recommendations of professional investment advisors. To address this issue, we propose a general framework to identify and estimate the parameters characterizing the preferences and beliefs of money managers. In a ...

Most studies of managed fund performance use measures that are susceptible to bias caused by common time variation in risks and risk premia. Ferson and Schadt (1996) propose a conditional performance measure that controls for the common variation. Their results suggest that incorporating lagged public information variables that have been shown to predict stock returns, such as interest rates an...

We examined the association between 50 m freestyle performance (50FS) and average speed (AS), peak (PS), minimum (MS) intracyclic variation (ISV) compared curves from swimmers with different levels using functional analysis of variance (FANOVA). Fourteen male (50FS: 22.50 ± 0.58 s) performed a maximal sprint speedometer AS, PS, MS, IVV were assessed for correlational analysis. 50FS obtained in ...

Since the onset of Global Financial Crisis, presence institutional investors in housing markets has steadily increased over time. Real estate funds (REIFs) and other investment firms leverage large-scale buy-to-rent investments real assets that enable them to set prices rental markets. A significant fraction this funding is being provided form non-bank lending (i.e., not subject regulatory LTV ...