Superannuation Researchers Review Retirement Funding Choices

Wednesday, 6 July 2011 Features

The Australian School of Business will host 19th Annual Colloquium of Superannuation Researchers on the campus of the University of New South Wales on the 14th and 15th of July.

The colloquium's theme this year is how to finance the retirement needs of an ageing population, and the implications for individuals, industry and public policy.

The colloquium will bring together speakers from government, business and academia to explore various approaches towards retirement saving. The focus is on issues associated with retirement income adequacy, benefit design, and funding health and aged care in retirement, in Australia and internationally.

Associate Professor Hazel Bateman, Director of the Centre for Pensions and Superannuation at the Australian School of Business says "as Australia's population ages individuals need to make informed choices now in order to minimise the economic and social consequences in the future. However, when it comes to making such choices the right option is not always clear and more guidance is required than ever before."

Keynote speakers include:

Olivia Mitchell from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, who will hold a session on how financial literacy and impatience shape retirement wealth and investment behaviours
Monika Bütler from the University of St Gallen in Switzerland, who has examined how much means tested benefits reduce the demand for annuities
Gordon Clark from the University of Oxford, who will show empirical evidence of increasing attraction of defined benefit versus defined contribution schemes
Carolyn Ndigwako Njenga and Michael Sherris from the Australian School of Business who have new research into the risk based capital requirements of living benefits using a Bayesian vector auto regression mortality model

When: 14-15 July, 2011
Where: Theatre M17, Chemical Sciences Building, Kensington Campus, UNSW