Publications

Publications

1. Personalized Information as a Tool to Improve Pension Savings: Results from a Randomized Control Trial in Chile, with O. Fuentes, J. Lafortune, J. Riutort and J. Tessada, accepted in Economic Development and Cultural Change, 2022.

Forecasting the impact of saving for retirement is challenging, particularly so for individuals with limited financial literacy. We explore how reducing that barrier by offering personalized information affects long-term savings. To this end, we randomly offered personalized versus general information within the context of individual retirement accounts in Chile. Personalized information increased voluntary pension savings. Heterogeneity analysis suggests that the updating of priors by information recipients played an important role. However, despite the significant short-term response to the intervention, its temporary nature and limited magnitude are not enough to meaningfully alter the annuity payment that would be obtained from the saving stock.

2. Mislearning and (Poor) Performance of Individual Investors, with O. Fuentes, J. Riutort and P. Searle, conditionally accepted in Journal of Pension Economics & Finance, 2022.

We study individuals’ incentives to make investment decisions. Using data from a large pension system in Chile we find that individuals who are active in managing their investments have, on average, poor performance. We provide robust evidence suggesting that learning plays an important part in this phenomenon. Indeed, individuals who have made successful investment decisions in the past go on to trade more frequently. However, this result holds when using a naive definition for successful decisions. Also, average performance is negatively related to the number of investment decisions, casting doubt on the existence of market timing skills.

3. Saving for the future: Evaluating the sustainability and design of Pension Reserve Funds, with P. Castañeda, R. Castro, E. Fajnzylber and J. Medina, Pacific-Basin Finance Journal, 2021.

In several countries public finances are under pressure by pension obligations rising due to downward trends in fertility, increased longevity and financial markets with low interest rates. For these reasons, the establishment of Pension Reserve Funds (PRF) has flourished. Regardless of the specific objectives that these PRFs may have, a critical issue is to assess their sustainability over the long-run. Moreover, this sustainability analysis is particularly complex, due to the interaction between the macroeconomic environment, financial performance and the labor market.

In this article, we use a projection model aimed to evaluate the sustainability of the PRF in a small open economy such as Chile. The case of Chile is interesting because it shares common features with economies open to international markets that have either defined benefits pension schemes and/or defined contribution schemes with minimum pension guarantees. Moreover, since the Chilean PRF features relatively well defined contribution and withdrawal rules, we have a framework against which our methodology can be used to explore the effects on PRF's sustainability of altering these rules.

Our methodology takes into consideration the stochastic nature of macroeconomic, financial and labor market variables in order to evaluate the sustainability of the PRF. In contrast to deterministic measures such as funding ratios, our methodology is more appropriate to assess the role of the contribution and withdrawal rules for PRFs in evaluating the key underlying risks and their consequences for the sustainability of PRFs.

4. Default investment strategies in a defined contribution pension system: a pension risk model application for the chilean case, with S. Berstein and O. Fuentes, Journal of Pension Economics & Finance, 2013.

In a defined contribution pension system, one of the main risks faced by members refers to the investment of funds. In this context, we discuss which is the most suitable risk measurement for the affiliates to the pension system. Different life-cycle investment strategies are evaluated under this measure for different types of workers. We point out the importance of designing well-suited default investment options in light of the economic behavior of members, characterized by low financial knowledge, inertia and myopia in decision-making. We calibrate a pension risk model for the Chilean economy, including measures of life-cycle income, human capital risk, investment and annuitization risks. Our results suggest that affiliates can gain (loss) around 0.85 percentage points in terms of average replacement rates in return for an increase (decrease) of 1 percentage point in risk, measured as standard deviation of replacement rates. Using a stochastic dominance analysis, we find that there are no dominated strategies when subsidies from the Solidarity Pillar are excluded. When the Solidarity Pillar is considered, the most appropriate investment strategies for affiliates that receive these subsidies are concentrated on the riskier funds. However, this also means that there could be increased pressure on Government spending in order to grant additional benefits to affiliates. Our model has a wide range of practical applications that go from informing affiliates about the degree of uncertainty associated to their expected replacement rate to a guide to evaluate how different investment strategies affect the expected values of affiliates’ pensions and their associated risk.

5. The delegated portfolio management problem: Reputation and herding, Journal of Banking & Finance, 2009.

This paper studies the relationship between financial intermediaries’ reputation and herding in a delegated portfolio management problem context. We show the conditions under which equilibria exist such that intermediaries with good reputation invest in private information, whereas those with poor reputation herd. The model’s empirical predictions are discussed and found to be consistent with previous evidence. From a normative stand, our work points out the possible existence of a policy trade-off between protecting investors by demanding more transparency from intermediaries and encouraging herding by free-riders for whom imitating portfolio decisions would be easier under tighter regulation, such as more frequent portfolio disclosure.