Download or read book Extending Life Cycle Models of Optimal Portfolio Choice written by and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 31 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper derives optimal life cycle portfolio asset allocations as well as annuity purchases trajectories for a consumer who can select her hours of work and also her retirement age. Using a realistically-calibrated model with stochastic mortality and uncertain labor income, we extend the investment universe to include not only stocks and bonds, but also survival-contingent payout annuities. We show that making labor supply endogenous raises older peoples' equity share; substantially increases work effort by the young; and markedly enhances lifetime welfare. Also, introducing annuities leads to earlier retirement and higher participation by the elderly in financial markets. Finally, if we allow for an age-dependent leisure preference parameter, this fits well with observed evidence in that it generates lower work hours and smaller equity holdings at older ages as well as sensible retirement age patterns.

Download or read book Life Cycle Portfolio Choice with a Realistic Retirement Age Distribution written by Fangyi Jin and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 33 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper numerically solves the optimal life-cycle portfolio choice when the model is calibrated to match the empirical retirement age distribution: people tend to retire only starting from their 50s. The model shows that financial incentives for keeping investors in labor force and low leisure preference for young investors endogenously restrict investors from retiring early. Thus, this paper suggests a novel effect of the early retirement option on portfolio choice. As opposed to results from earlier models, the optimal portfolio share of stock does not increase monotonically prior to retirement. Wealthy investors might find it optimal to reduce the stock share in their early stage of life in order to decrease the possibility of having insufficient wealth for retirement when they are older. Thus, the model predicts either an increasing or a hump-shaped pattern for life-cycle stock holding, consistent with empirical observations.

Download or read book Simple Allocation Rules and Optimal Portfolio Choice Over the Lifecycle written by Victor Duarte and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We develop a machine-learning solution algorithm to solve for optimal portfolio choice in a detailed and quantitatively-accurate lifecycle model that includes many features of reality modelled only separately in previous work. We use the quantitative model to evaluate the consumption-equivalent welfare losses from using simple rules for portfolio allocation across stocks, bonds, and liquid accounts instead of the optimal portfolio choices. We find that the consumption-equivalent losses from using an age-dependent rule as embedded in current target-date/lifecycle funds (TDFs) are substantial, around 2 to 3 percent of consumption, despite the fact that TDF rules mimic average optimal behavior by age closely until shortly before retirement. Our model recommends higher average equity shares in the second half of life than the portfolio of the typical TDF, so that the typical TDF portfolio does not improve on investing an age-independent 2/3 share in equity. Finally, optimal equity shares have substantial heterogeneity, particularly by wealth level, state of the business cycle, and dividend-price ratio, implying substantial gains to further customization of advice or TDFs in these dimensions.

Download or read book Strategic Asset Allocation written by John Y. Campbell and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2002-01-03 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Academic finance has had a remarkable impact on many financial services. Yet long-term investors have received curiously little guidance from academic financial economists. Mean-variance analysis, developed almost fifty years ago, has provided a basic paradigm for portfolio choice. This approach usefully emphasizes the ability of diversification to reduce risk, but it ignores several critically important factors. Most notably, the analysis is static; it assumes that investors care only about risks to wealth one period ahead. However, many investors—-both individuals and institutions such as charitable foundations or universities—-seek to finance a stream of consumption over a long lifetime. In addition, mean-variance analysis treats financial wealth in isolation from income. Long-term investors typically receive a stream of income and use it, along with financial wealth, to support their consumption. At the theoretical level, it is well understood that the solution to a long-term portfolio choice problem can be very different from the solution to a short-term problem. Long-term investors care about intertemporal shocks to investment opportunities and labor income as well as shocks to wealth itself, and they may use financial assets to hedge their intertemporal risks. This should be important in practice because there is a great deal of empirical evidence that investment opportunities—-both interest rates and risk premia on bonds and stocks—-vary through time. Yet this insight has had little influence on investment practice because it is hard to solve for optimal portfolios in intertemporal models. This book seeks to develop the intertemporal approach into an empirical paradigm that can compete with the standard mean-variance analysis. The book shows that long-term inflation-indexed bonds are the riskless asset for long-term investors, it explains the conditions under which stocks are safer assets for long-term than for short-term investors, and it shows how labor income influences portfolio choice. These results shed new light on the rules of thumb used by financial planners. The book explains recent advances in both analytical and numerical methods, and shows how they can be used to understand the portfolio choice problems of long-term investors.

Download or read book Optimal Portfolio Choice for Long horizon Investors with Nontradable Labor Income written by Luis M. Viceira and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 40 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper analyzes optimal portfolio decisions of long-horizon investors with undiversifiable labor income risk and exogenous expected retirement and lifetime horizons. It shows that the fraction of savings optimally invested in stocks is unambiguously larger for employed investors than for retired investors when labor income risk is uncorrelated with stock return risk. This result provides support for the popular recommendation by investment advisors that employed investors should invest in stocks a larger proportion of their savings than retired investors. This paper also examines the effect of increasing labor income risk on savings and portfolio choice and finds that, when labor income risk is independent of stock market risk, a mean-preserving increases in the variance of labor income growth increases the investor's willingness to save and reduce her willingness to hold the risky asset in her portfolio. A sensible calibration of the model shows that savings are relatively more responsive to changes in labor income risk than portfolio demands. Positive correlation between labor income innovations and unexpected asset returns also reduces the investor's willingness to hold the risky asset, because of its poor properties as a hedge against unexpected declines in labor income. This paper also provides intuition on the peculiar form of optimal portfolio choice of very young investors predicted by the standard life-cycle model

Download or read book ESSAYS ON PORTFOLIO CHOICE AND HEALTH OVER THE LIFE CYCLE written by You Du and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 97 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation examines the effect of health and its associated variables on households' consumption and portfolio choices over life cycle. The first two essays constitute my job market paper, which explains why the risky portfolio share rises in wealth from two health mechanisms: endogenous health investment and medical expenditure risk. The third chapter explores the effect of health and health risk on households' optimal consumption and portfolio decisions over life cycle. Chapter 1 titled ``PORTFOLIO CHOICE AND HEALTH ACROSS WEALTH: EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE" illustrates the empirical relationship between the portfolio puzzle and the heterogeneity of health variables across wealth. Classic financial theory suggests that under the assumption of no borrowing constraints and no mean-reverting stock returns, households should hold a constant risky portfolio in spite of their wealth, ages and life horizons (Samuelson (1969) and Merton (1969, 1971)). Yet data from the Survey of Consumers Finances (SCF) show that the risky portfolio share of financial assets increases in wealth. In the literature, this is called the ``portfolio puzzle". Meanwhile, various sources of data indicate that, compared with the non-wealthy households, the wealthy people have better health, longer life horizon, higher out of pocket medical spending with lower uncertainty, and more health care time. All these facts suggest a novel correlation between the portfolio puzzle and the heterogeneity of health variables across wealth and provide a robust empirical foundation to explain the portfolio puzzle from a health perspective. In Chapter 2 titled ``A LIFE CYCLE MODEL OF PORTFOLIO CHOICE AND HEALTH", a life cycle model with endogenous health investment and medical expenditure risk is proposed to capture the key empirical features in the first chapter. This calibrated model remarkably matches the U.S. data. I find that endogenous health investment is essential to explain the portfolio puzzle: if health is exogenous without investment, the model can only could deliver 7.2% of the risky share gap across wealth. Medical expenditure risk is less important and has a larger effect on the non-wealthy group. If I abstract from medical expenditure risk, the risky shares increase for both groups: 24% for the low wealth group and 5% for the wealthy group. This life cycle model provides new insights into how health affects households' financial behavior. Chapter 3 titled ``OPTIMAL CONSUMPTION AND PORTFOLIO CHOICE WITH HEALTH RISK" investigates the effect of health and health risk on households' optimal consumption and portfolio allocations over the life cycle. The simulation results show that consumption, savings in bonds, and savings in stocks all increase with health. The risky portfolio share, which is the ratio of savings in stocks to the total financial assets, demonstrates the same tendency for both health states over the life cycle: at the very young age, the risky portfolio share is relatively high. Starting from the middle age, this share falls significantly and keeps steady until the end of life. For most of the lifetime, the risky portfolio share is positively related with health. These results emphasize the importance of health and its associated risk in consumption and portfolio decisions.

Download or read book Life Cycle Asset Allocation and Unemployment Risk written by Fabio C. Bagliano and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 20 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this paper we extend the traditional life cycle model of saving and portfolio choice to allow for possible long-term unemployment spells to have permanent effects on subsequent labor income prospects. The risk of losing future labor income could imply strong human capital erosion for the investor at any age, dampening the incentive to invest in risky stocks. The resulting optimal portfolio share invested in stocks may be relatively flat in age, more in line with the available evidence and contrary to the predictions of traditional life-cycle models.

Download or read book Investing Retirement Wealth written by John Y. Campbell and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 50 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If household portfolios are constrained by borrowing and short-sales restrictions, or by fixed costs of participating in risky asset markets, then alternative retirement savings systems may affect household welfare by relaxing these constraints. This paper uses a calibrated partial-equilibrium model of optimal life-cycle portfolio choice to explore the empirical relevance of these issues. In a benchmark case, we find ex-ante welfare gains equivalent to a 3.7% increase in consumption from the investment of half of retirement wealth in the equity market. The main channel through which these gains are realized is that the higher average return on equities permits a lower Social Security tax rate on younger households, which helps households smooth their consumption over the life cycle. There is a smaller welfare gain of 0.5% of consumption when Social Security tax rates are held constant. We also find that realistic heterogeneity of risk aversion and labor income risk can strongly affect optimal portfolio choice over the life cycle, which provides one argument for a privatized Social Security system with an element of personal portfolio choice.

Download or read book Portfolio Choice Over the Life cycle in the Presence of trickle Down Labor Income written by Luca Benzoni and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 49 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Empirical evidence shows that changes in aggregate labor income and stock market returns exhibit only weak correlation at short horizons. As we document below, however, this correlation increases substantially at longer horizons, which provides at least suggestive evidence that stock returns and labor income are cointegrated. In this paper, we investigate the implications of such a cointegrated relation for life-cycle optimal portfolio and consumption decisions of an agent whose non-tradable labor income faces permanent and temporary idiosyncratic shocks. We find that, under economically plausible calibrations, the optimal portfolio choice for the young investor is to take a substantial ¿Xem short} position in the risky portfolio, in spite of the large risk premium associated with it. Intuitively, this occurs because the cointegration effect makes the present value of future labor income flows stock-like' for the young agent. However, for older agents who have shorter times-to-retirement, the cointegration effect does not have sufficient time to act, and the remaining human capital becomes more bond-like.' Together, these effects create a hump-shaped optimal portfolio decision for the agent over the life cycle, consistent with empirical observation

Download or read book Evaluating the Financial Performance of Pension Funds written by Richard Hinz and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2010-01-14 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Countries around the world are increasingly relying on individual pension savings accounts to provide income in old age for their citizens. Although these funds have now been in place for several decades, their performance is usually measured using methods that are not meaningful in relation to this long-term objective. The recent global financial crisis has highlighted the need to develop better performance evaluation methods that are consistent with the retirement income objective of pension funds. Compiling research derived from a partnership among the World Bank, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and three private partners, 'Evaluating the Financial Performance of Pension Funds' discusses the theoretical basis and key implementation issues related to the design of performance benchmarks based on life-cycle savings and investment principles. The book begins with an evaluation of the financial performance of funded pension systems using the standard mean variance framework. It then provides a discussion of the limitations inherent to applying these methods to pension funds and outlines the many other issues that should be addressed in developing more useful and meaningful performance measures through the formulation of pension-specific benchmark portfolios. Practical implementation issues are addressed through empirical examples of how such benchmarks could be developed. The book concludes with commentary and observations from several noted pension experts about the need for a new approach to performance measurement and the impact of the recent global financial crisis on pension funds.

Download or read book Asset Market Participation and Portfolio Choice Over the Life Cycle written by Andreas Fagereng and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We study the life cycle of portfolio allocation following for 15 years a large random sample of Norwegian households using error-free data on all components of households' investments drawn from the Tax Registry. Both, participation in the stock market and the portfolio share in stocks, have important life cycle patterns. Participation is limited at all ages but follows a hump-shaped profile which peaks around retirement; the share invested in stocks among the participants is high and flat for the young but investors start reducing it as retirement comes into sight. Our data suggest a double adjustment as people age: a rebalancing of the portfolio away from stocks as they approach retirement, and stock market exit after retirement. Existing calibrated life cycle models can account for the first behavior but not the second. We show that incorporating in these models a reasonable per period participation cost can generate limited participation among the young but not enough exit from the stock market among the elderly. Adding also a small probability of a large loss when investing in stocks, produces a joint pattern of participation and of the risky asset share that is similar to the one observed in the data. A structural estimation of the relevant parameters of the model reveals that the parameter combination that fits the data best is one with a relatively large risk aversion, small participation cost and a yearly large loss probability of around 1.3 percent.

Download or read book Optimal Portfolio Choice with Health Contingent Income Products written by Shang Wu and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 41 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whereas there is ample evidence that life-contingent income products (life annuities) have the potential to improve individual welfare, combining them with health-contingent income products (resulting in so-called life care annuities) would serve to further increase welfare for individuals who are exposed to uncertain out-of-pocket healthcare expenditure later in life. We develop a life-cycle model of annuitization, consumption, and investment decisions for a single retired individual who faces stochastic capital market returns, uncertain health status, differential mortality risks, and uncertain out-of-pocket healthcare expenditure with cost of dying. Using the calibrated model, we show that individuals who are eligible to purchase life care annuities instead of standard life annuities increase their level of annuitization by around 12 percentage points. Health status at retirement affects the extent to which the insurance feature and the pricing advantage of life care annuities contribute to this increment, with end-of-life healthcare expenditure being of particular importance. Also, life care annuities allow individuals to consume more throughout their retirement and to invest a higher proportion of their liquid wealth in the risky asset. They are willing to pay a loading up to 21% for having access to life care annuities.

Download or read book How to Invest Over the Life Cycle written by Martin Wallmeier and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 33 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We analyse the state of the art in the field of life cycle portfolio choice, a recent strand of the literature on intertemporal portfolio selection. Life cycle models are designed to identify optimal savings and portfolio policies over the lifetime of investors. They can help to improve pension schemes by showing how these could be specifically tailored to the individual employee's circumstances to overcome the quot;one-size-fits-allquot; philosophy still prevailing in parts of the mandatory retirement savings system. To facilitate comparison, we first describe set-up, solution method and characteristic results for a basic model and then derive a general framework to classify existing contributions. We highlight the models' strengths and weaknesses and assess their ability to resolve existing portfolio puzzles. Lessons from the literature are summarized and promising areas for further research identified.

Download or read book Portfolio Choice with Internal Habit Formation written by Francisco J. Gomes and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 64 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Reshaping Retirement Security written by Raimond Maurer and published by Oxford University Press on Demand. This book was released on 2012-09-27 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book explores the lessons to be learnt for retirement planning and long-term financial security in view of the massive shocks to stock markets, labour markets, and pension plans caused by the financial crisis. It aims to rethink the resilience of defined contribution plans and how defined benefit plans reacted to the financial crisis.

Download or read book Stock Market Mean Reversion and Portfolio Choice Over the Life Cycle written by Alexander Michaelides and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 101 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We solve for optimal consumption and portfolio choice in a life-cycle model with short-sales and borrowing constraints, undiversifiable labor income risk and a predictable, time-varying, equity premium and show that the investor pursues aggressive market timing strategies. Importantly, in the presence of stock market predictability, the model suggests that the conventional financial advice of reducing stock market exposure as retirement approaches is correct on average, but ignoring changing market information can lead to substantial welfare losses. Therefore, enhanced target-date funds (ETDFs) that condition on expected equity premia increase welfare relative to target-date funds (TDFs). Out-of-sample analysis supports these conclusions.

Download or read book Life Cycle Portfolio Choice written by Florian Zainhofer and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 50 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We use panel data from the Swiss Labor Force Survey to estimate age-earnings profiles as well as transitory and permanent income shock variances for investor groups distinguished by gender, education and activity rate. Estimation results are then used to stylize several different Swiss investor types. Finally, we determine optimal life cycle consumption, savings and risky asset share for these investor types using a recent computational life cycle model of portfolio choice suggested by Cocco et al. (2005). We are particularly interested in the allocation differences between the investor types and their normative implications.