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Age dependent investing: Optimal funding and investment strategies in defined contribution pension plans when members are rational life cycle financial planners

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  • Blake, David
  • Wright, Douglas
  • Zhang, Yumeng

Abstract

A defined contribution pension plan allows consumption to be redistributed from the plan member’s working life to retirement in a manner that is consistent with the member’s personal preferences. The plan’s optimal funding and investment strategies therefore depend on the desired profile of consumption over the lifetime of the member. We investigate these strategies under the assumption that the member is a rational life cycle financial planner and has an Epstein-Zin utility function, which allows a separation between risk aversion and the elasticity of intertemporal substitution. We also take into account the member’s human capital during the accumulation phase of the plan and we allow the annuitisation decision to be endogenously determined during the decumulation phase. We show that the optimal funding strategy involves a contribution rate that is not constant over the life of the plan but is age-dependent and reflects the trade-off between the desire for current versus future consumption, the desire for stable consumption over time, the member’s attitude to risk, and changes in the level of human capital over the life cycle. We also show that the optimal investment strategy during the accumulation phase of the plan is ‘stochastic lifestyling’, with an initial high weight in equity-type investments and a gradual switch into bond-type investments as the retirement date approaches in a way that depends on the realised outcomes for the stochastic processes driving the state variables. The optimal investment strategy during the decumulation phase of the plan is to exchange the bonds held at retirement for life annuities and then to gradually sell the remaining equities and buy more annuities, i.e., a strategy known as ‘phased annuitisation’.

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Bibliographic Info

Paper provided by University Library of Munich, Germany in its series MPRA Paper with number 34277.

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Date of creation: Sep 2011
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Handle: RePEc:pra:mprapa:34277

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Related research

Keywords: Defined Contribution Pension Plan; Funding Strategy; Investment Strategy; Epstein-Zin Utility; Stochastic Lifestyling; Phased Annuitisation; Dynamic Programming;

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  1. Kim, Myung Jig & Nelson, Charles R & Startz, Richard, 1991. "Mean Reversion in Stock Prices? A Reappraisal of the Empirical Evidence," Review of Economic Studies, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 58(3), pages 515-28, May.
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  3. Blake, David, 1996. "Efficiency, Risk Aversion and Portfolio Insurance: An Analysis of Financial Asset Portfolios Held by Investors in the United Kingdom," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 106(438), pages 1175-92, September.
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  10. Campbell, John Y. & Viceira, Luis M., 2002. "Strategic Asset Allocation: Portfolio Choice for Long-Term Investors," OUP Catalogue, Oxford University Press, number 9780198296942.
  11. Thomas Leonard, 2008. "Richard H. Thaler, Cass R. Sunstein, Nudge: Improving decisions about health, wealth, and happiness," Constitutional Political Economy, Springer, vol. 19(4), pages 356-360, December.
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  13. Poterba, James M. & Summers, Lawrence H., 1988. "Mean reversion in stock prices : Evidence and Implications," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 22(1), pages 27-59, October.
  14. Constantijn W.A. Panis, 2003. "Annuities and Retirement Satisfaction," Working Papers 03-17, RAND Corporation Publications Department.
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