Optimal investment and benefit payment strategies for TB pension plans with stochastic interest rate under the HARA utility.

This paper studies the optimal investment and benefit payment strategies for target benefit (TB) pension plans. The pension fund receives contributions from active members and pays benefits to retirees. Meanwhile, the accumulated wealth is invested in financial market consisting of one risk-free asset and one risky asset, in which the risk-free interest rate is described by the Vasicek model. The general hyperbolic absolute risk aversion (HARA) utility is adopted to describe pension fund managers' risk preferences. Using the dynamic programming approach, we construct the Hamilton–Jacobi–Bellman (HJB) equation and obtain explicit expressions for optimal investment and benefit payment strategies using the Legendre transform-dual technique. Finally, numerical analysis is presented to illustrate the sensitivity of the optimal strategies to model parameters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]