About Us

Mission Statement

Why we started the Pensions Institute
Despite the tremendous importance of pensions and pension funds to individuals, companies and governments, and despite widespread interest within the academic community on specific issues related to pensions, there are very few international centres for pension studies and before the Pensions Institute was established in 1996, there was no academic centre exclusively devoted to pensions in the UK.
The Mission and Objectives of the Pensions Institute
The mission of the Pensions Institute is to undertake or organize high quality research in all fields related to pensions, to disseminate the results of that research to both the academic and practitioner community, to establish an international network of pension researchers from a variety of disciplines, and to provide expert advice to the pensions industry and government.

Specific objectives include:

1) Undertaking or organizing research in such fields as:

Pension Microeconomics, dealing with the economics of individual and corporate pension planning and retirement decisions.
Pension Fund Management and Performance, dealing with the asset-liability management, investment management, and investment performance of both occupational and personal pension schemes.
Pension Contingency Analysis and Valuation, dealing with actuarial and insurance issues related to pension annuities and retirement.
Pension Law and Regulation, dealing with legal aspects of pension schemes and pension fund management.
Pension Accounting, Taxation and Administration, dealing with operational aspects of running pension schemes.
Marketing of private sector pension schemes, dealing with the practice and ethics of marketing pension products.
Macroeconomics of Pensions, dealing with the consequences of the size and maturity of pension funds on other sectors of the economy (e.g.corporate, public and international sectors).
Public Policy, dealing with domestic and EU social policy towards pension provision and other employee benefits in light of factors such as the Social Chapter of the Maastrict Treaty and the demographic timebomb in Europe and other countries.

2) Disseminating the results of the research by means of:

Discussion Papers
Publications in Academic and Practitioner Journals
The Internet
Seminars, workshops and conferences.

3) Providing expert advice on the results of this research to the pensions industry and to government.

Research disseminated by the Pensions Institute may include views on policy but the Pensions Institute itself takes no institutional policy positions.

The Pensions Institute was set up initially in 1996 by David Blake and Mike Orszag at Birkbeck College. It moved to Cass Business School in January 2004.