Management of Portfolio Depletion Risk through Optimal Life Cycle Asset Allocation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Members of defined contribution (DC) pension plans must take on additional responsibilities for their investments, compared to participants in defined benefit (DB) pension plans. The transition from DB to DC plans means that more employees are faced with these responsibilities. We explore the extent to which DC plan members can follow financial strategies that have a high chance of resulting in a retirement scenario that is fairly close to that provided by DB plans. Retirees in DC plans typically must fund spending from accumulated savings. This leads to the risk of depleting these savings, that is, portfolio depletion risk. We analyze the management of this risk through life cycle optimal dynamic asset allocation, including the accumulation and decumulation phases. We pose the asset allocation strategy as an optimal stochastic control problem. Several objective functions are tested and compared. We focus on the risk of portfolio depletion at the terminal date, using such measures as conditional value at risk (CVAR) and probability of ruin. A secondary consideration is the median terminal portfolio value. The control problem is solved using a Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman formulation, based on a parametric model of the financial market. Monte Carlo simulations that use the optimal controls are presented to evaluate the performance metrics. These simulations are based on both the parametric model and bootstrap resampling of 91 years of historical data. The resampling tests suggest that target-based approaches that seek to establish a safety margin of wealth at the end of the decumulation period appear to be superior to strategies that directly attempt to minimize risk measures such as the probability of portfolio depletion or CVAR. The target-based approaches result in a reasonably close approximation to the retirement spending available in a DB plan. There is a small risk of depleting the retiree’s funds, but there is also a good chance of accumulating a buffer that can be used to manage unplanned longevity risk or left as a bequest.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".