Asynchronous risk: retirement savings, equity markets, and unemployment

摘要

Retirement savings in defined contribution plans vary as a result of the timing and frequency of unemployment spells. We hypothesize that unemployment is coincident with negative shocks to equities prices, implying workers may systematically miss investment opportunities. First we match historic stock returns to unemployment hazards by gender, and earnings quartile. Next we test the relationship between unemployment, equity returns, and pension savings, by repeated simulation. Finally, we find that the timing of unemployment spells amplifies retirement savings losses on average for all worker-types in our analysis. Timing impacts are observed to be largest for high earnings workers and to increase with unemployment losses disproportionately.