Optimal management and inflation protection for defined contribution pension plans

Zhang, Aihua; Korn, Ralf and Ewald, Christian-Oliver (2007): Optimal management and inflation protection for defined contribution pension plans. Unpublished.

Abstract

Due to the increasing risk of inflation and diminishing pension benefits, insurance companies have started selling in°ation-linked products. Selling such products the insurance company takes over some or all of the inflation risk from their customers. On the other side financial derivatives which are linked to inflation such as inflation linked bonds are traded on financial markets and appear to be of increasing popularity. The insurance company can use these products to hedge its own inflation risk. In this article we study how to optimally manage a pension fund taking positions in a money market account, a stock and an inflation linked bond, while financing investments through a continuous stochastic income stream such as the plan member's contributions. We use the martingale method in order to compute an analytic expression for the optimal strategy and express it in terms of observable market variables.

• Item Type: MPRA Paper
• Institution: University of St.Andrews, School of Economics and Finance
• Language: English
• Keywords: Pension mathematics; in°ation; long-term investment; stochastic optimal control; martingale method
• Subjects: E - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics > E4 - Money and Interest Rates > E44 - Financial Markets and the Macroeconomy; G - Financial Economics > G1 - General Financial Markets > G12 - Asset Pricing; Trading volume; Bond Interest Rates; C - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods > C6 - Mathematical Methods and Programming > C61 - Optimization Techniques; Programming Models; Dynamic Analysis

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