Risk Allocation in Retirement Plans: A Better Solution

The corporate world is reconsidering the cost‐effectiveness of defined benefit pension plans while contemplating a change to defined contribution plans. This article begins by examining the three primary risks faced by sponsors of most DB pension plans—investment risk, interest rate risk, and longevity risk—and shows how shifting these risks to employees through a DC plan would affect both the corporation and the individual. Although DC plans clearly help companies manage risks, they provide at best an incomplete solution for individual participants. This article describes an innovation in pension design—the Retirement Shares Plan (RSP)—that combines many of the best features of DB and DC plans. An RSP provides:

• ? predictable and stable cost to the plan sponsor, with little chance of unfunded liabilities;
• ? lifetime income, guaranteeing that retirees will never outlive their benefits;
• ? a benefit accrual pattern comparable to that of traditional pension plans that preserves value for older, long‐service employees; and
• ? potential inflation protection for retirees.

The RSP accomplishes this by allocating risk to sponsors and individuals differently than either a traditional DB plan or a DC plan. Unlike most DB plans, the RSP shifts investment and interest rate risks from plan sponsors to participants. Unlike DC plans, the RSP keeps longevity risk with the sponsor.     

Guaranteeing Defined Contribution Pensions: The Option to Buy Back a Defined Benefit Promise

After a long commitment to defined benefit (DB) pension plans for U.S. public sector employees, many state legislatures have introduced defined contribution (DC) plans for their public employees. In this process, investment risk that was previously borne by state DB plans has now devolved to employees covered by the new DC plans. In light of this trend, some states have introduced a guarantee mechanism to help protect DC plan participants. One such guarantee takes the form of an option permitting DC plan participants to buy back their DB benefit for a price. This article develops a theoretical framework to analyze the option design and illustrate how employee characteristics influence the option's cost. We illustrate the potential impact of a buy‐back option in a pension reform enacted recently by the State of Florida for its public employees. If employees were to exercise the buy‐back option optimally, the market value of this option could represent up to 100 percent of the DC contributions over their work life.     

Macroeconomic Aspects of Private Retirement Programs

Abstract

The decline in importance of private defined benefit plans in relation to defined contribution plans in the United States is a major issue of interest to pension actuaries. This decline has been attributed to numerous factors: costs of government regulation, societal and cultural changes, changed employer attitudes, and employees’ lack of understanding of defined benefit plans. It has also caused some observers to proclaim the end of private defined benefit plans. This paper analyzes possible macroeconomic factors contributing to the crisis of defined benefit plans and proposes an alternative hypothesis for the cause of the crisis: the decline of the relative attractiveness of defined benefit plans in relation to defined contribution plans when these are viewed as investments, that is, as securities in capital markets.     

“On the Merger of Two Companies,” Hans Gerber and Elias S. W. Shiu,July 2006

Abstract

Bankruptcy risk falls to pension plan participants if a plan sponsor fails when a defined benefit (DB) pension plan is underfunded. This article examines the incidence of that risk and how it changes when public policy provides a guarantee fund. Although government-based guarantee funds are in a unique position to provide pension protection, primarily because of the extent to which the risk of sponsor default is systematic in nature, a looming question is the extent to which such guarantees are exposed to moral hazard. The article focuses on that question using data from four Canadian provinces, including one (Ontario) that operates a guarantee fund for pensions. The findings show that plan assets per DB-plan participant increase with the earnings of workers and decrease with higher unemployment, and that level of assets also is moderated by the influence of taxes, with higher plan assets observed when and where tax rates are higher. Plans in Ontario had on average $20,035 less in asset value per participant, and Ontario plans covered by the guarantee fund had an average of $16,497 less per participant than other Canadian DB plans not backed by a guarantee fund. A separate model finds the presence of a guarantee fund to be one of a very small number of variables significant in explaining variability in the plans’ funded ratios. These empirical results are consistent with the existence of moral hazard.     

Valuation of an early exercise defined benefit underpin hybrid pension

In this paper, we consider three types of embedded options in pension benefit design. The first is the Florida second election (FSE) option, which has been offered to public employees in the state of Florida since 2002. The state runs both defined contribution (DC) and defined benefit (DB) pension plans. Employees who initially join the DC plan have the option to convert to the (DB) plan at a time of their choosing. The cost of the switch is assessed in terms of the ABO (Accrued Benefit Obligation), which is the expected present value of the accrued DB pension at the time of the switch. If the ABO is greater than the DC account, the employee is required to fund the difference. The second is the DB Underpin option, also known as a ‘floor offset’ or a ‘Greater-of-benefit’ plan, under which the employee participates in a DC plan, but with a guaranteed minimum benefit based on a traditional DB formula. The third option can be considered a variation on each of the first two. We remove the requirement from the FSE option for employees to fund any shortfall at the switching date. The resulting plan is similar to the DB underpin, but with the possibility of early exercise. We adopt an arbitrage-free pricing methodology to value each option. We analyse and value the optimal switching strategy for the employee by constructing an exercise frontier, and we illustrate numerically the difference between the FSE, DB Underpin and Early Exercise DB Underpin options.     

Comparing Costs and Risks of Retirement Plans for Sponsors

This stochastic simulation analysis compares funding costs and volatilities for private sponsors of traditional defined benefit (DB), pension equity (PE), cash balance (CB), and defined contribution (DC) retirement plans. Plan provisions of equivalent benefit generosity in the different plan types are determined. The modeling includes current funding requirements and practices as well as a comprehensive set of uncertainties in asset and labor markets. The results show that costs and risks for sponsors vary significantly with plan types, investment and funding strategies, and participant demographics. The hybrid PE and CB plans exhibit characteristics of cost efficiency, as in the DB plan, and risk reduction, as in the DC plan, for plan sponsors under conventional investment strategies. These features are more saliently observed in the CB plan, but it is also more difficult to implement effective asset–liability management strategies for it.     

Do Markets Like Frozen Defined Benefit Pensions? An Event Study

An increasing number of North American companies are freezing or terminating their traditional defined benefit (DB) pension plans. In this article we document a positive announcement effect when a publicly traded company discloses that it has partially or fully frozen its DB plan and replaced it with—or enhanced—the 401(k) defined contribution (DC) plan. This positive risk‐adjusted return is greater for firms with higher beta and/or lower return on equity (ROE) prior to the freeze. In other words the positive impact is more pronounced for firms that are likely to face financial distress if they maintain their traditional pension plan and the associated long‐term promises.     

Smoothing Mechanisms in Defined Benefit Pension Accounting Standards: A Simulation Study*

The accounting for defined benefit (DB) pension plans is complex and varies significantly across jurisdictions despite recent international convergence efforts. Pension costs are significant, and many worry that unfavorable accounting treatment could lead companies to terminate DB plans, a result that would have important social implications. A key difference in accounting standards relates to whether and how the effects of fluctuations in market and demographic variables on reported pension cost are “smoothed". Critics argue that smoothing mechanisms lead to incomprehensible accounting information and induce managers to make dysfunctional decisions. Furthermore, the effectiveness of these mechanisms may vary. We use simulated data to test the volatility, representational faithfulness, and predictive ability of pension accounting numbers under Canadian, British, and international standards (IFRS). We find that smoothed pension expense is less volatile, more predictive of future expense, and more closely associated with contemporaneous funding than is “unsmoothed” pension expense. The corridor method and market‐related value approaches allowed under Canadian GAAP have virtually no smoothing effect incremental to the amortization of actuarial gains and losses. The pension accrual or deferred asset is highly correlated with the pension plan deficit/surplus. Our findings complement existing, primarily archival, pension accounting research and could provide guidance to standard‐setters.     

“De‐risking” Corporate Pension Plans: Options for CFOs

Until the stock market bubble burst in 2000–2002, most CFOs viewed their defined benefit pension plans as profit centers and relatively risk‐free sources of income. Since neither pension assets nor liabilities were reported on corporate balance sheets, and expected returns on pension stocks could be substituted for actual returns when reporting net income, the risks associated with DB plans were masked by GAAP accounting and thus assumed to have no bearing on corporate capital structure. But when stock prices and corporate profits fell together, the risks associated with conventional stock‐heavy pension plans showed up first in reduced pension surpluses (or, in many cases, deficits) and then later in higher required cash contributions and lower reported earnings. As a consequence, today's investors (and rating agencies) are viewing pension and other legacy liabilities as corporate debt, and demands for transparency and increased funding have triggered accounting changes and proposed legislative reforms that will further unmask the economics. This article aims to provide both private‐sector and public‐sector CFOs with suggestions for reducing and controlling the cost of providing for the retirement of their employees. Profitable, tax‐paying companies with DB plans should consider (1) funding any unfunded liabilities (if necessary, by issuing debt) and (2) reducing pension equity and interest rate exposures by shifting some (if not all) pension assets into bonds and defeasing the pension liability (achieving a tax arbitrage in the process). And in cases where the expected costs of maintaining DB plans outweigh the benefits, companies should consider freezing or terminating their plans and switching to a defined contribution (DC) or some form of hybrid plan. The authors also propose similar changes for public pension plans, where underfunding and mismatch problems are greater, less transparent, and in some ways less tractable than those of corporate DB plans.     

Management of Portfolio Depletion Risk through Optimal Life Cycle Asset Allocation

Members of defined contribution (DC) pension plans must take on additional responsibilities for their investments, compared to participants in defined benefit (DB) pension plans. The transition from DB to DC plans means that more employees are faced with these responsibilities. We explore the extent to which DC plan members can follow financial strategies that have a high chance of resulting in a retirement scenario that is fairly close to that provided by DB plans. Retirees in DC plans typically must fund spending from accumulated savings. This leads to the risk of depleting these savings, that is, portfolio depletion risk. We analyze the management of this risk through life cycle optimal dynamic asset allocation, including the accumulation and decumulation phases. We pose the asset allocation strategy as an optimal stochastic control problem. Several objective functions are tested and compared. We focus on the risk of portfolio depletion at the terminal date, using such measures as conditional value at risk (CVAR) and probability of ruin. A secondary consideration is the median terminal portfolio value. The control problem is solved using a Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman formulation, based on a parametric model of the financial market. Monte Carlo simulations that use the optimal controls are presented to evaluate the performance metrics. These simulations are based on both the parametric model and bootstrap resampling of 91 years of historical data. The resampling tests suggest that target-based approaches that seek to establish a safety margin of wealth at the end of the decumulation period appear to be superior to strategies that directly attempt to minimize risk measures such as the probability of portfolio depletion or CVAR. The target-based approaches result in a reasonably close approximation to the retirement spending available in a DB plan. There is a small risk of depleting the retiree’s funds, but there is also a good chance of accumulating a buffer that can be used to manage unplanned longevity risk or left as a bequest.     

The Impact of Scale,Complexity, and Service Quality on the Administrative Costs of Pension Funds: A Cross‐Country Comparison

Administrative costs per participant appear to vary widely across pension funds in different countries. Using unique data on 90 pension funds over the period 2004–2008, this article examines the impact of scale, the complexity of pension plans, and service quality on the administrative costs of pension funds, and compares those costs across Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, and the United States. We find that, except for Canada, large unused economies of scale exist. Higher service quality and more complex pension plans significantly raise costs. Administrative costs vary significantly across pension fund types, with differences amounting to 100 percent.     

Pension Contributions and Firm Performance: Evidence from Frozen Defined Benefit Plans

We study the impact of freezing defined benefit (DB) pension plans and replacing them with defined contribution (DC) plans on liquidity, financial leverage, investment, and market value of a sample of firms over 2001‐2008. We find evidence that the pension freeze tends to attenuate the drain on corporate liquidity and relieve the pressure to borrow to pay for mandatory contributions (MCs) associated with underfunded DB plans. Although investors seem to favor the pension freeze as evidenced by positive announcement abnormal stock returns, there is little reliable evidence that the freeze increases investment efficiency and long‐term stock performance.     

Defined Benefit or Defined Contribution? A Study of Pension Choices

We solve an empirically parameterized life‐cycle model of consumption and pension choices to show how expected earnings growth and risk affect the benefits of final‐salary defined benefit (DB) pension plans, relative to pension plans that are defined contribution (DC) in nature. We use micro data on the pension choices of individuals to provide evidence consistent with the model predictions: (1) individuals who expect a higher growth rate of earnings are more likely to choose DB final‐salary schemes, and (2) individuals who face a higher variance of persistent income shocks are less likely to choose DB final‐salary schemes. We control for cohort and age fixed effects in the empirical analysis.     

Does freezing a defined benefit pension plan affect firm risk?

This paper examines the impact of a defined benefit (DB) pension plan freeze on the sponsoring firm's risk and risk-taking activities. Using a sample of firms declaring a hard freeze on their DB plans between 2002 and 2007, we observe an increase in total risk (proxied by the standard deviation of EBITDA and asset beta), equity risk (standard deviation of returns), and credit risk following a DB-plan freeze. The increase in credit risk is reflected in a decline in credit ratings and an increase in bond yields for freezing firms. When we examine investment strategies, we observe a shift in investment from capital expenditures before the freeze to more-risky R&D projects after the freeze, and an increase in leverage. These strategies (increased focus on R&D and higher leverage) increase the operating and financial risk the firm faces. Overall, we observe an increase in risk-taking following DB plan freezes, consistent with theories that DB plans act as “inside debt” that aligns managers’ interests with bondholders’.     

公务员养老保险改革国际趋势及对中国启示

公务员养老保险制度是社会保障制度重要组成部分,公平与可持续的公务员养老保险制度关系着经济的持续发展与社会的长治久安。随着社会经济环境的变化,一些国家受人口、经济、政治、管理等因素影响,已经或正在进行公务员养老保险制度改革。改革主要趋势由"分立"转向"统一",由给付确定制(DB)转向缴费确定制(DC),改革主要措施包括引入积累制因素、建立自主缴费制度、制定科学的计发办法、逐步提高退休年龄等。我国自20世纪90年代开始实施养老金制度改革,但公务员养老保险一直延续着计划经济时代所确立的离退休制度,改革进程缓慢。随着市场经济的深入发展,机关和企业双轨制的养老保险制度的弊端日益显露,结合自身国情借鉴国际经验加速改革步伐势在必行。     

Allocating Shareholder Capital to Pension Plans

This article discusses the corporate challenge of providing retirement income to employees while limiting the costs and risks of pension plans to the companies themselves by addressing five main questions:

• ? What are the major issues and challenges surrounding pensions? Although the pension shortfalls have been the focus of attention, the author argues that the more serious concern is the risk stemming from the mismatch between pension assets and pension liabilities— that is, the funding of debt‐like liabilities with equity‐heavy asset portfolios.
• ? To what extent do the equity market and equity prices reflect the shortfall in value and the mismatch in risk? While the author describes some evidence of the market's ability to capture pension risk, analysts' P/E multiples and management's assessments of cost of capital may still be distorted by failure to take full account of the risks associated with pension assets.
• ? How should management analyze and formulate strategic solutions? Without offering specific solutions, the author presents a framework for analyzing the problem from a strategic perspective that can be used in formulating a company's pension policy. In particular, the article recommends that companies take an integrated perspective that views pension assets and liabilities as parts of the corporate balance sheet, and the pension asset allocation decision as a critical aspect of a corporate‐wide enterprise risk management program.
• ? If a company chooses to make a major change in its pension policy, such as a partial or complete immunization accomplished by substituting bonds for stocks, how would you communicate the new policy to the rating agencies and investors?
• ? What are the major issues to be thinking about when contemplating a change from a DB plan to a defined contribution, or DC, plan? The author argues that DC plans without some corporate oversight or responsibility for results are not a long‐term solution.

     

现金余额型职业养老金计划及其对我国的启示

现金余额型养老金计划是美国职业养老金近年衍生出的创新模式之一,作为混合型计划的一种,其兼具确定给付型和确定缴费型养老金制度的特点。本文运用比较法分析了现金余额型养老金计划的运行机理,进而在分析我国目前职业养老金面,临的困境的基础上,指出现金余额型养老金计划对我国职业养老金建设的借鉴意义,具体包括：DC计划不是职业养老金...     

Florida's Pension Election: From DB to DC and Back

During the year 2002, the State of Florida's 600,000 public employees were given the choice of converting their traditional defined benefit (DB) pension plan into an individual‐account defined contribution (DC) plan with full control over asset allocation and investment decisions. To mitigate some of the risk and uncertainty in the decision, the State granted each employee electing the DC plan an additional option to switch back (i.e., change their mind once) at any point prior to retirement. This option has been labeled the 2nd election by the State and the cost of reentry is fixed at the accumulated benefit obligation of their pension entitlement, which is the present value of the life annuity. Our article presents some original analytic insights relating to the optimal time and financial value of this unique 2nd election. Although our model is deterministic in nature, we believe that it provides a number of intuitive insights that are quite robust. Our results can be contrasted with Lachance, Mitchell, and Smetters (2003) . We estimate that the increase in retirement wealth that arises from having the 2nd election is equivalent to at most 30 percent in future value, and only when utilized optimally. Furthermore, for most State employees above the age of 45, the 2nd election has little economic value because the DB plan dominates the DC plan from day one. Of course, it remains to be seen what percent of Florida's 600,000 employees will elect to behave rationally with their newfound pension autonomy.     

The Public Role of Actuaries in Private Pensions in Canada

Abstract

Actuaries have played prominent public roles in the development of occupational pension plans and social security arrangements in Canada. These roles include advising governments and government-appointed committees about regulatory structures, establishing funding standards, actively participating in regulatory functions, and pioneering valuation work for pension plans covering public sector employees. The formation in 1965 of the Canadian Institute of Actuaries led to the accreditation of actuaries in pension and tax legislation and to the development of actuarial standards of practice for pension work.