Investing for retirement: Terminal wealth constraints or a desired wealth target?

Abstract

We investigate how well different investment strategies can give pre-retirees more certainty about their income in retirement, whilst allowing them to benefit from taking investment risk. Under an expected utility-maximizing framework, we find that a loss aversion utility function gives a high degree of certainty about its desired wealth target and is robust to different market models. Imposing terminal wealth constraints does not improve the certainty of achieving the desired target enough to counterbalance the increased chance of obtaining a lower income. The power utility function is not robust to different market models and becomes too risk-averse with wealth constraints.