Essays on pension finance and dynamic asset allocation

This thesis addresses a few topics in pension finance and dynamic asset allocation, including: (i) the quality of pension profile of condition indexation schemes from a life-cycle investment perspective; (ii) the valuation of conditionally indexed pension liabilities in the framework of market valuation; (iii) the optimal consumption and portfolio decision in a setting where expected returns on stocks are time-varying, but unobservable; and (iv) how to include the asset class of commodities into the traditional portfolio of stocks and bonds by investigating the implications of commodity return predictability arising from mean-reverting commodity prices.