Constrained portfolio choices in the decumulation phase of a pension plan

Marina Di Giacinto, Salvatore Federico (), Fausto Gozzi and Elena Vigna

No 155, Carlo Alberto Notebooks from Collegio Carlo Alberto

Abstract: This paper deals with a constrained investment problem for a defined contribution (DC) pension fund where retirees are allowed to defer the purchase of the annuity at some future time after retirement. This problem has already been treated in the unconstrained case in a number of papers. The aim of this work is to deal with the more realistic case when constraints on the investment strategies and on the state variable are present. Due to the difficulty of the task, we consider the basic model of [Gerrard, Haberman & Vigna, 2004], where interim consumption and annuitization time are fixed. The main goal is to find the optimal portfolio choice to be adopted by the retiree from retirement to annuitization time in a Black and Scholes financial market. We define and study the problem at two different complexity levels. In the first level (problem P1), we only require no short-selling. In the second level (problem P2), we add a constraint on the state variable, by imposing that the final fund cannot be lower than a certain guaranteed safety level. This implies, in particular, no ruin. The mathematical problem is naturally formulated as a stochastic control problem with constraints on the control and the state variable, and is approached by the dynamic programming method. We give a general result of existence and uniqueness of regular solutions for the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation and, in a special case, we explicitly compute the value function for the problem and give the optimal strategy in feedback form. A numerical application of the special case - when explicit solutions are available - ends the paper and shows the extent of applicability of the model to a DC pension fund in the decumulation phase.

Keywords: pension fund; decumulation phase; constrained portfolio; stochastic optimal control; dynamic programming; Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C61 G11 G23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 54 pages
Date: 2010
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

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