The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about development issues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry the names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank and its affiliated organizations, or those of the Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent.

Regulation in countries that have adopted de…ned contribution (DC) pension systems based on savings accounts typically includes minimum return guarantees (MRG) provisions to limit the risk of …nancial downturns. This paper studies the consequences of this regulation over asset allocation within a standard model of dynamic portfolio selection, where managers act strategically while making their investment decisions as in (Basak and Makarov, 2008, Strategic Asset Allocation with Relative Performance Concerns. Working Paper. London Business School).We study a standard dynamic portfolio choice problem in a setting that includes two new ingredients: strategic interaction among portfolio managers and the presence of a MRG. The (pure strategy Nash) equilibrium portfolios are provided in closed-form in the Black and Scholes setting. They are shown to be weighted averages of investment rules that are themselves optimal in scenarios that may become optimal once the uncertainty has resolved.Our results also suggest that MRG rules that rely on index-based benchmark portfolios (as opposed to peer-group ones) may help to mitigate some of the problems that arise when portfolio managers are too prone to relative performance concerns (i.e., the selection of myopic portfolios).

A new Unemployment Insurance System based on individual accounts was launched in Chile on October 2002. One of the most interesting features of the system is given by the compensation scheme of the fund manager, which contains a performancebased incentive benchmarked to one of the default portfolios of the pension system (pension funds Type E, with a 100% investment in fixed-income securities).This paper studies the portfolio choice problem of a fund manager which is subject to a similar performance-based compensation scheme. We model the portfolio choice problem of a risk averse portfolio manager that must finance an exogenous sequence of benefits, and whose terminal payoff depends upon the terminal value of the portfolio under management, relative to an exogenous benchmark portfolio. Our interest is on the consequences of the incentive scheme over the portfolio that is selected by the portfolio manager.For the Black and Scholes [1973] economy we are able to determine the investment policy in closed form. We show that the riskiness of the portfolio depends on the composition of the benchmark, and that the fund manager is motivated to imitate the investment policy of the benchmark in some random scenarios.JEL Classification: D81; G11; G18; and H55.

One of the most important consequences of the Chilean pension reform undertaken in the early 1980s was to transfer a significant portion of the risk associated to the financing of pensions, from the State, to the pension fund participants of the newly established compulsory pension system. This paper is concerned with the risk embedded in the portfolio strategies of pension fund portfolio managers.We develop an analytic framework that permits to incorporate the behavior of a pension fund manager in the long-term risk assessment of its investment strategy, where the latter is conducted from the point of view of the pension fund participant, who has preferences over his/her final pension. The pension fund manager's problem is cast as a dynamic portfolio choice problem, and its solution is used afterwards to quantify the risk exposure of the pension fund participant.Our results from a simulation exercise show that the lower is the risk aversion of the participant, the higher is his/her Wealth-at-Risk -defined as the monetary compensation that leaves the participant indifferent with respect to his/her outside option-a result that is due to the fact that the outside option increases relatively more than the benefit derived from the pension provided by the fund manager. The same logic is behind the negative relationship between stock return volatility and pension risk.JEL classification: D81; G11; G18; and H55.

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