This paper addresses two important parts of the problem of saving for retirement. They are (1) if assets are to be held in both conventional (and hence taxable) accounts and pension accounts, which assets should be held in each? and, (2) if the investor is substantially risk averse, what is the optimal mix of stocks and bonds for retirement saving? It is shown that the conventional wisdom of first placing heavily taxed corporate bonds in the pension account (and holding equity mutual funds outside the account) is the wrong asset location strategy for most people and most circumstances. It is also shown that even very risk averse retirement savers should allocate more than half of their portfolio to stocks if asset returns have the same means, variances, and covariances as have been observed over the past seventy years.
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Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number
7007.
Length: Date of creation: Mar 1999 Date of revision: Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:7007
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Find related papers by JEL classification: G11 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Portfolio Choice; Investment Decisions
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References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Thomas E. MaCurdy & John B. Shoven, 1992.
"Stocks, Bonds, and Pension Wealth,"
NBER Chapters,
in: Topics in the Economics of Aging, pages 61-78
National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
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