There is a worldwide trend towards defined contribution savings plans, where investors are often able to select their own portfolios. How much is this freedom of choice worth? We present retirement investors with information about the distribution of outcomes they could expect to obtain from the portfolios they picked for themselves, and the same information for the median portfolio selected by...

Demographic changes increase the necessity to base pension system more and on second third pillars, namely occupational private plans; this paper deals with Target Date Funds (TDFs), which are a typical investment opportunity for planners. TDFs usually identified decreasing fraction of wealth invested in equity (a so-called glide path) as retirement comes closer, i.e. is riskily younger saver i...

After 2000, the vast majority of defined benefit (DB) pension plans encountered a decrease in their funding ratios, largely due to a drop in asset prices. It is possible that public sector pension plans may have acted imprudently by chasing returns, once they encountered underfunding. We identify four indicators for DB plans’ imprudent investment behavior: no portfolio rebalancing, employer con...

For almost four decades, various plans and policies have been tried to improve socioeconomic development in the Central African Republic. The results, however, are mixed. At present, the situation in the Central African Republic is characterized by widening poverty, caused by weak economic growth that has failed to keep up with high population growth, and the social and economic consequences of...

Economists have observed a shift in productivity growth from IT-producing to IT-using industries after the dot-com bust, but the causes of this shift remain unexplained. This paper uses fine-grained data on IT labor movements from online resume databases to track the flow of skills out of IT producing firms after the dot-com bust, and to test the hypothesis that a reallocation of these technica...

introduction: one of the main objectives for the stability of the governments is to provide welfare and development for societies. therefore, the development process leads to government’s function. there’s an agreement on the importance of governments to expedite the development process in the third-world literature. and it’s considered as one of the elements which has had a strong affectin cha...

The social brain hypothesis assumes the evolution of social behaviour changes animals' ecological environments, and predicts evolutionary shifts in social structure will be associated with changes in brain investment. Most social brain models to date assume social behaviour imposes additional cognitive challenges to animals, favouring the evolution of increased brain investment. Here, we presen...