TOR-ERIK BAKKE, University of Wisconsin - Madison - Department of Finance, Investment and Banking
Email: tbakke@wisc.edu
TONI M. WHITED, University of Wisconsin - Madison - School of Business
Email: twhited@bus.wisc.edu

This paper examines whether firms react to cash shortfalls by cutting investment. We use a regression discontinuity design in which the discontinuity is the point of violation of underfunding of corporate defined benefit pension plans. We reexamine the puzzling evidence in Rauh (2006) that mandatory pension contributions cause sharp investment declines, finding that these results are likely due to the endogeneity that this study is trying to avoid. We also compare firm-year observations in which the firm's pension assets are just barely less than its pension liabilities to observations in which assets are just greater than liabilities. In this quasi-experimental setting, we find little evidence that firms cut back on investment. Instead, they mostly use a variety of financial tools, such as receivables factoring and payout cuts, to fund their pension liabilities.

OLIVIA S. MITCHELL, University of Pennsylvania - Insurance & Risk Management Department, National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)
Email: mitchelo@wharton.upenn.edu
STEVEN A. SHARPE, Federal Reserve Board - Research & Statistics
Email: SSHARPE@FRB.GOV
S. BLAKE NESBITT, University of Pennsylvania - The Wharton School
Email: blake.nesbitt@gmail.com
JULIA LYNN CORONADO, Barclays Capital
Email: julia.coronado@barcap.com

Some research has suggested that companies with defined benefit (DB) pensions are sometimes significantly misvalued by the market. This is because the measures of pension cost and pension net liabilities embedded in financial statements, taken at face value, can provide a very misleading picture of pension finances. The more pertinent information on pension finances is relegated to footnotes, but this might not receive much attention from portfolio managers. But dramatic swings in the financial conditions of large DB plans around the turn of the decade focused widespread attention on pension accounting practices, and dissatisfaction with current accounting standards has recently prompted the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) to take up a project revamp DB pension accounting. Arguably, the increased attention should have made investors wise to the informational problems, thereby eliminating systematic mispricing in recent years. We test this proposition and conclude that investors continued to misvalue DB pensions, inducing sizable valuation errors in the stock of many companies. Our findings suggest that FASB's current reform efforts could substantially aid the market's ability to value firms with DB pensions.

CHRISTIAN E. WELLER, University of Massachusetts Boston - Department of Public Policy and Public Affairs
Email: cweller@americanprogress.org
JEFFREY B. WENGER, University of Georgia - School of Public and International Affairs
Email: jwenger@epinet.org

After 2000, the vast majority of defined benefit (DB) pension plans encountered a decrease in their funding ratios, largely due to a drop in asset prices. It is possible that public sector pension plans may have acted imprudently by chasing returns, once they encountered underfunding. We identify four indicators for DB plans' imprudent investment behavior: no portfolio rebalancing, employer conflicts of interest, trustee conflicts of interest, and failure to implement best investment practices.

To see if public sector pension plans rebalance their portfolios, we use data from the Federal Reserve's Flow of Funds, dating from 1952 to 2007. To test for the remaining three hypotheses, we use data from the Census' State and Local Government Employee Retirement Systems data base, where consistent data for state and local government plans are available from 1993 to 2005. Our results suggest that there is no evidence that public sector plans systematically engaged in imprudent investment behavior and that this did not systematically differ after 2000 from the earlier period.

FRANCESCO A. FRANZONI, Swiss Finance Institute c/o University of Lugano
Email: francesco.franzoni@unisi.ch

Mandatory contributions to defined benefit pension plans provide a unique identification strategy to estimate the market's assessment of the value of internal resources controlling for investment opportunities. The price decrease following a pension-induced drop in cash is magnified for firms that appear a prior more financially constrained, suggesting a negative effect of financing frictions on investment. In contrast, low control on managerial discretion attenuates the negative price reaction to contributions consistent with empire-building theories. While overinvestment seems to be the prevalent distortion in a panel of large firms, underinvestment appears to dominate in a sample that is more representative of the cross-section of listed companies.

ZVI BODIE, Boston University - Department of Finance & Economics
Email: zbodie@bu.edu
HENRIETTE M. PRAST, Tiburg University
Email: prast@wrr.nl

The aim of this paper is to explore a new type of pension plan tailored to the needs and preferences of individuals living in Europe. The personal pension accounts that we propose are semi-tailored contracts that are rational when judged from the perspective of normative economic theory. Such contracts can be designed and marketed through an employer, a trade union, or other trusted institution so as to minimize agency costs and take advantage of scale economies. Moreover, they can be offered as optimal defaults to groups of plan members with similar characteristics. There is much that governments can do at very low cost to facilitate the efficient production of these contracts.

THOMAS F. CROSSLEY, University of Cambridge - Economics
Email: Thomas.Crossley@econ.cam.ac.uk
MARIO JAMETTI, York University - Department of Economics
Email: jametti@econ.yorku.ca

Pension benefit guarantee policies have been introduced in several countries to protect private pension plan members from the loss of income that would occur if a plan was underfunded when the sponsoring firm terminates a plan. Most of these public insurance schemes face financial difficulty and consequently policy reforms are being discussed or implemented. Economic theory suggests that such schemes will face moral hazard and adverse selection problems. In this note we test a specific theoretical prediction: insured plans will invest more heavily in risky assets. Our test exploits differences in insurance arrangements across Canadian jurisdictions. We find that insured plans invest about 5 percent more in equities than do similar plans without benefit guarantees.