This issue features four articles and a book review section. The first article in the issue is by Stefan Engström (Stockholm School of Economics) and Anna Westerberg (National Social Insurance Board) and examines “Which Individuals Make Active Decisions in the New Swedish Pension System?” The vast majority of empirical evidence on how individuals make decisions in defined contribution plans has been based on US experience and the unique choices available within 401(k) plans. Therefore, the paper by Engström and Westerberg, which examines the situation in Sweden where the institutional details and investment choices are somewhat different, is a most welcome contribution to the literature.

This issue features three original research articles and an issues & policy article. The first article in the issue is by David McCarthy (Oxford University, UK). A Life Cycle Analysis of Defined Benefit Plans examines optimal benefit design within the context of a lifecycle model. The model finds that the structure of defined benefit plans is unlikely to be optimal for younger workers. The intuition is straightforward: defined benefit pensions depend heavily on the evolution of a worker's human capital and young workers are already heavily exposed to human capital risks. Older workers however may find wage indexed claims to be more valuable as most other human capital uncertainty has vanished.

This issue features three original research articles, an issues & policy article and, as we noted in the Review of 2002 above, a new book review section. As in issues in our first volume, the articles in this issue span a broad range of topics.

This paper provides a detailed examination of individuals' active participation in a new public and mandatory defined contribution pension system. The new pension system was launched in the fall of 2000 and entitles Sweden's workforce of 4.4 million individuals to invest part of their individual pension account in mutual funds. Our findings show that the system is associated with a reversed investment behavior compared with studies of 401(k) plans; that is, individuals tend to make their own investment decisions. Contrary to US studies, we also find that women and younger individuals are more likely than men and older individuals to make an active investment decision.

This paper employs a lifecycle model from the consumption–savings literature to examine the tradeoffs between defined benefit and defined contribution pension plans. We examine the effects of varying risk aversion, varying initial income and financial wealth, and varying wage processes (that may be correlated with returns on the risky asset).

Results indicate that wage-indexed claims are not an optimal vehicle for retirement policy if the decision to participate is made early in life, because individuals hold most of their wealth in their human capital and would not wish to increase their exposure to income shocks. Later in life, after most of a worker's human capital has been converted to financial assets, defined benefit pension plans help increase diversification by reducing exposure to financial market risk. The access that defined benefit plans provide to annuities markets and possible guaranteed rates of return over the risk-free rate increase the value of defined benefit plans to workers. The model also predicts that wage-indexed claims will be more valuable when equity markets provide low expected returns or are highly variable and when annuity markets are inefficient.

The model illustrates two economic functions performed by defined benefit plans. Firstly, DB plans pool individual wage risks. This allows older workers to buy a wage-linked security that increases their exposure to wage risks. Secondly, they create a group annuities market that reduces the cost of adverse selection.

The Chilean national pension system is often viewed as the model for moving from a pay-as-you-go system to a prefunded, individual account system. One measure of its success has been its 12% average real rate of return. This study uses monthly return data to examine the source of these returns and to compare the risk-adjusted returns of the pension system to those of Chilean stock indices, debt instruments, and mutual funds. Tests using the Sharpe ratio and the multi-factor Jensen alpha suggest that the pension returns are consistent with the overall riskiness of the Chilean economy. Based on our findings, neither the structure of the Chilean pension system nor the performance of the fund managers should permit the system to earn abnormally high returns in the future.

This paper deals with solvency requirements for life annuities portfolios and funded pension plans. Particular emphasis is devoted to longevity risk, i.e. the risk arising from uncertainty in future mortality trends. This risk must be faced by insurance companies and pension plans that have guaranteed lifelong payoffs.

Solvency is investigated referring to immediate annuities, and hence the so-called decumulation phase is addressed. To assess solvency, assets are compared with the random present value of liabilities. Several requirements are considered, each leading to a required asset level that must be financed both with premiums (or contributions) and capital allocation.

Employer-related pensions are a common and extremely important component of the compensation paid to workers in both the public and private sectors of developed economies. Many private pensions are insufficiently funded, exposing workers to the risk of a loss should their employer cease operations and not be available to meet pension obligations.

In this paper we study the role of guarantee funds as providers of insurance to workers against the failure of firms with underfunded defined benefit pension plans. Employing a model that predicts pension underfunding, we consider first how private guarantee funds might operate and then explore some potential advantages of public funds.

Overall, we do find that both public and private funds provide insurance benefits. However, private guarantee funds requiring ex ante premia payments may be infeasible in the presence of capital market imperfections, and funds which rely upon ex post contributions may suffer from strategic uncertainty. A public fund can overcome this coordination problem. However, a public fund, such as that administered by the US Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, may lead to: (i) greater underfunding of pensions, (ii) distortions in the market participation decisions of firms and (iii) the inclusion of excessively risky assets in the pension portfolio. In some cases, a guarantee fund is not welfare improving.

This paper examines the effects of unfunded public pensions on national income, growth rate, and employment in a model à la Lucas (1988) consistent with the empirical finding in Schoeni (1997). Our model shows that a public pension system can lead to a take-off from a low growth trap to a higher growth equilibrium.

Singapore has a publicly managed central provident fund (CPF) system, which is compulsory and based on individual accounts with an explicit link between contribution and benefits. This paper assesses the adequacy of the CPF saving to meet the retirement needs of the elderly in Singapore. Instead of emphasizing the mechanism of accumulation, we focus on the expenditure side of the lifetime budget of the elderly and estimate the present value of retirement consumption (PVRC). The estimated PVRC is obtained by simulations through three major components: calibration of subsistence and medical expenses of the elderly; forecast of cohort survival probability by age and by sex; and generation of yield curves to discount the future cash flows. Our results indicate that the existing CPF-decreed minimum sum is inadequate to meet the future consumption needs of the female elderly. The inadequacy becomes more severe when medical expense is set at higher growth rates. Moreover, the monthly payouts of a single premium deferred annuity are computed as illustrative examples.

This paper applies the method of mechanism design to find optimal linear pension rules (contribution rate and monthly benefit function) for flexible retirement: First the government announces a rule, making the benefit dependent on employment length. Each individual, having private information on his own expected lifespan and utility function, optimizes his employment length, conditional on that rule. The government chooses the optimal Bayesian linear rule, which maximizes the social welfare (e.g. the aggregate individual maxima) under a social constraint (e.g. the aggregate net lifetime contribution equals zero). Under this rule there is a better compromise between incentives and insurance than under so-called actuarially fair benefits.

For a single equity-linked contract (hence with no mortality diversification), we examine the implications of using option pricing theory to fix the premium. We consider investment strategies involving the underlying, bonds and European puts and compute different probabilities of real loss at any time during the contract term, a form of VaR calculation. With the objective of chosing a strategy to minimize loss probabilities, we exhibit a variety of situations depending on the guarantee, the volatility and the age of the insured.

This paper analyses the thrust of the UK Government's pension reforms in the context of the system they inherited. The reforms represent continuity with what went before in seeking to continue the privatisation of pension provision, but herald a new emphasis on pensioner poverty reduction. There is a clear broad strategy even though not all of the reforms fit obviously within it – a generous means-tested system, extensive private provision and a diminished contributory pension. In the long term, this strategy has advantages in terms of containing public sector liabilities, but involves further downgrading the contributory principle. It will also affect the incentive to save for many individuals. Individuals currently on means-tested benefits will be able to keep more of their savings as a result of the reform. But those currently outside the means-tested benefit regime who expect to be brought into it as a result of the reforms will face a diminished incentive to save.

The raison d'être of wage-indexed defined benefit pension funds is to provide insurance against standard-of-living risk after retirement, based on intergenerational risk sharing. Pension funds necessarily have to accept mismatch risk in providing this kind of insurance. Mismatch risk taken by the pension fund is risk for the fund's stakeholders. We combine the value-based approach and the method of generational accounting to analyze the economic value of the stakes of the different generations and the issue of who gains and who loses (transfers of value between generations) from alternative funding and indexation policies. Rules concerning the allocation of a funding surplus or funding shortage in particular are decisive to the direction and to the size of transfers of value between stakeholders. We put forward two criteria to evaluate alternative policies employed by pension funds: the funding policy and allocation rules must give an ex ante fair compensation for risk taken by generations and the sustainability of a pension plan must be checked with respect to ex post redistributive effects for current and future generations. Value-based generational accounting provides a tool for testing a pension fund policy for these two criteria.

Pension systems may have a different impact on the two genders because women are less likely than men to work in formal labor markets and earn lower wages when they do. Recent multi-pillar pension reforms tighten the link between payroll contributions and benefits, leading critics to argue that they will hurt women. In contrast, supporters of these reforms argue that women will be helped by the removal of distortions pillar and the better targeted redistributions in the new systems. This paper examines the differential impact of the new and old systems in three Latin American countries – Chile, Argentina and Mexico. Based on household survey data, we simulate the wage and employment histories of representative men and women, the pensions that these are likely to generate under the new and old rules, and the relative gains or losses of the two genders due to the reform. We find that women do indeed accumulate private annuities that are only 30–40% those of men in the new systems. However, this effect is mitigated by sharp targeting of the new public pillars toward low earners, many of whom are women, and by restrictions on payouts from the private pillars, particularly joint annuity requirements. As a result, low-earning married women are the biggest gainers from the pension reform.