Dynamic Asset and Liability Management for Swiss Pension Funds

Abstract

This chapter presents an asset and liability model for Swiss pension funds. This includes an asset dynamics model and an optimization technique to solve the problem of allocating the funds considering the liabilities maturity structure. Its liability model is based on the current and projected future cash outflows of all members, taking into account: projection of the individuals' income, probabilities of entry and exit of members, and probabilities of death and invalidity of members. For the modelling of the various probabilities, it uses a life insurance mathematics approach. This results in a dynamic, stochastic description of the pension fund liabilities. The projected uncertain future cash flows are sorted by their date of payment. Payments in a certain period are summed up in liability buckets. Furthermore, it computes the obligations that arise from the current wealth of funds where future contributions are not taken into account. Similar to the liability buckets, the obligations are also summed up into obligation buckets. The buckets give a manageable description of the pension fund's liabilities (and obligations) and their term structure. The assets are modeled from the perspective of a Swiss investor. It uses a dynamic factor model with heavy-tailed residuals to model stock and bond market prices. It proposes an optimization technique for the asset liability management problem where the liability buckets are matched with available wealth of the pension fund. The optimization problem is to minimize the shortfall of bucket funding while reaching a required future surplus. The solution results in an asset allocation for each liability bucket based on its time horizon. In this way, we realize the life-styling hypothesis for each individual across the entire pension fund.