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This chapter discusses the basics of risk management, the major risks a pension fund faces, and how these risks may be managed. The principles of hedging and return enhancement are explained, and the conditions under which they are sensible are examined. Effective techniques are presented for managing the three major types of risks that pension funds face: investment risks, surplus risk, and sponsor/plan risk.

It is useful to divide retirement-related risks into three broad categories: investment risk, funding risk, and longevity risk. Investment risk is the risk that retirement resources will earn an inadequate rate of return. Funding risk is the danger that the funds necessary to finance adequate retirement benefits will not be contributed to the plan. For both these categories, defined benefit arrangements place responsibility upon the employer for financing the benefits promised by the plan. Defined contribution arrangements shift the investment and funding risks to the employee. Longevity risk is the danger that a retiree will outlive his retirement resources. The traditional, annuity-paying defined benefit plan provides partial protection against this since such a pension disburses retirement payments periodically and continues such annuity-type payments until the participant's death, often with payments continuing to the participant's surviving spouse. While the defined contribution participant can eliminate his longevity risk by annuitizing his account balance, such individually-purchased annuities typically suffer from the cost-related problem of adverse selection.

This chapter examines how public investment guarantees can facilitate infrastructure investment in developing countries, focusing on guarantee by multilateral and bilateral agencies to debt investors in infrastructure projects. It describes the main risks that investors in infrastructure services in developing countries typically face and the main types of public guarantee instruments currently being offered. The findings reveal that while the existing guarantee products from multilateral development banks and bilateral export credit agencies can lower the costs of capital and lengthen maturities, currency-related risks remain inadequately covered. To address this problem, this chapter proposes complementary guarantee instruments including contingent liquidity facilities, countercyclical guarantees and sovereign risk pools.

This chapter shows how looking at the homeowner's entitlement bundle anew through the lens of property theory might point the way to a new, reduced-risk version of homeownership. The chapter argues that whereas viewing property as a bucket has a prescriptive punch line, the observation that homeownership consists of a bundle is purely descriptive. Although the bundle that makes up homeownership can be dissected in many different ways, the analysis presented in this chapter focuses on two distinct elements that are purchased by the homebuyer: a consumption stream that lasts as long as she chooses to occupy the home; and an investment in the home itself, the underlying asset that produces the consumption stream. The chapter also discusses homeownership, which is widely viewed as one of the most important stabilizing forces in society but comes packaged with an enormous dose of investment risk.

The book concludes that because post-conflict economic reconstruction takes place amid the political, security, and social transitions it is fundamentally different from “development as usual”; that without the creation of dynamism and social inclusion in the economy peace will be elusive; and that the high chance countries have of reverting to war makes reconstruction a significant risk-high reward investment for the international community and the respective countries. Case studies presented in this book and elsewhere provide ample evidence that economic reconstruction is a critical but neglected aspect of transition to peace. A development as usual approach; the failure to develop a realistic comprehensive strategy for reconstruction; the lack of effective aid and technical assistance mechanisms; and the inexistence of appropriate and specific institutional arrangements to deal with reconstruction at the international and national levels have failed to help countries to stand on their own feet in peacetime.

This chapter explores the transition from a pay-as-you-go system of social security pensions to an investment-based system in an economy in which portfolio returns and capital profitability are both uncertain. It analyzes the effects of investment risk on a proposal for prefunding social security put forward in earlier work by Martin Feldstein and Andrew Samwick. Feldstein and Samwick examine the effect of adding modest contributions to personal retirement accounts (PRAs) — initially set at 3 percent of earnings. Over a seventy-five-year transition period, as PRA savings accumulate, payroll taxes could decline to zero, and the PRA contribution rate could rise slightly to a steady-state 4.25 percent level. The chapter also assumes that the PRA portfolio is invested 60 percent in equities and 40 percent in corporate bonds, and suggests that investment risk in this portfolio can be handled by a combination of a higher PRA contribution rate, to shift the distribution of retirement benefits upward, and a government guarantee that total benefits under the new system will be at least as large as those under the current system.

In the private sector, the expansion of the individual account paradigm will continue in the years ahead without significant controversy or impediment. In contrast, there will be increasing contention about public employees' defined benefit coverage as governmental decision-makers emulate their private sector counterparts by embracing individual account plans to shift investment, funding, and longevity risks to public employees. Equally disputatious will be the debate about efforts to expand the use of HSAs, a debate which addresses the fundamental implications of the defined contribution paradigm: the merits of individual ownership and control, the benefits of risk-pooling, the costs of adverse selection, and the distributional consequences of individual accounts. There will be no resurrection of traditional defined benefit pension plans. Even if the advocates of such plans succeed in pruning the regulatory burdens on traditional pension plans, there will be no wholesale return to the classic defined benefit paradigm.

Investment risk and longevity risk are borne by the plan sponsor in a defined benefit plan or by the plan participant in a defined contribution plan. By contrast, a proposed new Retirement Shares Plan (RSP) would allocate longevity risk to the plan sponsor and investment risk to the plan participant. The RSP also permits the participant to retain some control over the investment risk, so as to tailor that risk to his specific circumstances. This allocation of risk provides predictable and stable cost to the plan sponsor with little change of unfunded liabilities. The retiree received lifetime income and potential inflation protection.

This chapter introduces the concept of securitization that aims at the separation of origination, servicing, and investing functions and then classifies types of investment risks (funding, interest rate, prepayment, credit, and liquidity). These risks are borne differently by MBS-backed government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs or agencies) and private entities (non-agencies). The chapter explains structuring (directing cash flows paid by borrowers to various priority investors), its purposes, and common features found in both agency and non-agency MBS.

This chapter turns to the bottom line of outsourced regeneration and self-regulation – the colossal financial riches made, following the money from government to the immediate companies and then through to their ultimate owners, often offshored in tax havens. A first section recaps on the variety of unnecessary costs imposed on the public sector through PFI procurement that would simply not be possible if the scheme was financed and procured directly through the public sector. A second section focuses on the complex yet lucrative financial deals done to raise the upfront investment that provide private banks, financial market traders and PFI investors with enormous, risk-free profits. A third section turns to the generous profit margins commanded by the construction and maintenance firms in these PFI schemes from the lack of genuine competition in the procurement process. A fourth section details how corporate consultants and the big four accountancy firms also financially benefit from advising and auditing on these schemes in ways that create real conflicts of interest. A final section that follows these different profitable financial flows through the MFN regeneration scheme.

For all its promise, the activity on the new frontiers of philanthropy faces significant headwinds. For one thing, it tends to advantage service programs over advocacy ones, which may divert resources from fundamental social change objectives needed to open opportunities toward less effective ameliorative service activities. In addition, the field has rather optimistic expectations about potential return rates on social-impact investments and about the adequacy of investable opportunities. This chapter examines these and other obstacles and finds that there is reason for concern but not despair.

This chapter argues that while cultural differences among countries affect entrepreneurship, there is evidence that these cultural differences may be overstated as determining the degree of entrepreneurship of a country. More important are the factors of economic situation within a country that strengthen or inhibit entrepreneurship. High on the list of such factors is the perception of risk to entrepreneurs and investors in them. Thus, developing new institutions that manage the risk of entrepreneurship is essential. There is also a need to develop better institutions for encouraging basic scientific research.

This chapter introduces basic concepts of modern finance theory and demonstrates how to apply them in complex real-world problems. Financial deals and investment decisions are typically determined under uncertainty.Therefore, although this chapter is self-contained, we have to expect some theoretical background in individual decisionmaking and optimal investment under uncertainty. We organize our discussion into four central sections. The starting point is a portfolio choice problem, where an investor has to choose between different assets with specific risk and return characteristics. We then move on to some option pricing applications. We first derive analytical formulas and then evaluate numerical procedures for pricing European and American options as well as more exotic option products. The third section elaborates on credit risk measurement and management using a corporate bond portfolio as example. In the last section we discuss mortality risk and the optimal portfolio structure of a life insurance company. This section provides different numerical approaches to find an optimal portfolio structure with many risky assets. It begins with simple measures of risk and return of a single asset and then develops decision rules to choose optimal portfolios that maximize expected utility of wealth in worlds without and with riskless borrowing and lending opportunities. The purpose of this section is to optimize a portfolio of equity shares and a risk-free investment opportunity. The investor faces the most basic two-period investment choice problem: He buys assets in the first period and these assets pay off in the next period. The problem of the investor is to choose from i = 1, . . . ,N risky assets which may be shares, bonds, real estate, etc. The gross return of each asset i is denoted by rit = qit/qit−1 − 1, where qit−1 is the first-period market price and qit − qit−1 the second-period payoff.

This chapter explores the implications of systematic action research in policy-making community. It argues that systematic action research is a process that could be embedded in the public sphere, offering solutions to endemic social and organisational problems. This chapter highlights the importance of the following: 1) building emergence into organisational decision-making processes; 2) generating a different sort of evidence; 3) rethinking dissemination and roll-out; 4) re-assessing investment risk; 5) replacing the principle of consistency with the idea of appropriate action; 6) enabling sustainable interventions; and 7) re-conceptualising participation.

In the introduction to the history of Swiss Reinsurance Company Tobias Straumann describes the main challenges the company encountered throughout its 150 years of history. He lists underwriting and investment as the two main existential risks. But also the small home market which forced the company to do international business from the very start required complex management skills. He identifies four eras to best describe the history of Swiss Re: 1. from establishment until the Great Depression; 2. 1939 to 1945 which was marked by stagnation and a defensive business strategy; 3. the post-Second-World-War period until 1990, dealing with difficulties in keeping the technical business profitable and the adoption of a diversification strategy; and, 4. a final period shaped by globalization.

This chapter explores vectors necessary for tackling the integration issues posed by blockchain technologies in derivatives markets. It begins with an overview of a typical derivatives transaction and a discussion of the basic regulatory infrastructure designed to address the risks of the derivatives markets today, including its registration regime. Next the chapter provides an overview as to how blockchain could be applied in the derivatives markets. In a third step, it explores the ways in which a blockchain-based derivatives market could possibly reduce risk, followed by an overview of some of the risk concerns about blockchain raised by market participants and how they may be addressed. The chapter concludes by considering an issue that has escaped considerable attention—how the application of today's risk-based registration regime on tomorrow's blockchain market may actually increase risk.