 A Stochastic Control Approach to Defined Contribution Plan Decumulation: “The Nastiest, Hardest Problem in Finance”Peter A. Forsyth North American Actuarial Journal, 2022, vol. 26, issue 2, 227-251 Abstract: We pose the decumulation strategy for a defined contribution (DC) pension plan as a problem in optimal stochastic control. The controls are the withdrawal amounts and the asset allocation strategy. We impose maximum and minimum constraints on the withdrawal amounts, and impose no-shorting no-leverage constraints on the asset allocation strategy. Our objective function measures reward as the expected total withdrawals over the decumulation horizon, and risk is measured by expected shortfall (ES) at the end of the decumulation period. We solve the stochastic control problem numerically, based on a parametric model of market stochastic processes. We find that, compared to a fixed constant withdrawal strategy, with minimum withdrawal set to the constant withdrawal amount the optimal strategy has a significantly higher expected average withdrawal, at the cost of a very small increase in ES risk. Tests on bootstrapped resampled historical market data indicate that this strategy is robust to parametric model misspecification. Date: 2022 Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:uaajxx:v:26:y:2022:i:2:p:227-251 Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from DOI: 10.1080/10920277.2021.1878043 Access Statistics for this article North American Actuarial Journal is currently edited by Kathryn Baker More articles in North American Actuarial Journal from Taylor & Francis Journals |
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