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Changes in employment contracts and the provision of occupational pension schemes together with the Employment Equality (Age) regulations are likely to impact on the psychological contract between employers and employees. This paper aims to investigate the potential nature of this impact.

The role of DB and DC pension schemes are examined. The psychological contract, e.g. the employer's promise to the employee of a certain pension outcome in return for long‐term loyal service and sense of loyalty and commitment, have prompted employers to rethink.

DC pensions do not reward workers who have risen through an organisation in the same way as DB schemes and are generally less expensive. It is argued that employers have shifted their emphasis from the relational component of the psychological contract to the transactional. In contrast with the difficulties that the Regulations may create for employers, they provide greater flexibility and choice to those who, for whatever reason, wish to remain in employment, at least until the age of 65.

This paper was compiled through a literature review and the authors' own knowledge of the subject and will be of interest to those in business.

The paper aims to examine the role of an occupational pension in employees' psychological contracts, the degree to which such pensions influence decisions relating to employee recruitment and retention, and attitudes of managerial employees to the recent Employment Equality (Age) Regulations.

Thirty‐six in‐depth interviews were conducted with managerial employees in order to examine the topics described above.

It is found that the role of an occupational pension in employees' psychological contracts is related to age, and that they play a much greater role in the psychological contracts of older employees. The provision of an occupational pension was found to be more successful in promoting the retention rather than the recruitment of staff. The managerial employees interviewed were overwhelmingly supportive of the introduction of the recent Employment Equality (Age) Regulations, but some expressed scepticism that they would be implemented faithfully by their organisations.

Further research is needed to examine the impact of the widespread closure of defined benefit pension schemes on employment decisions. The small sample size used in this research means no claims can be made to external validity.

The original features of the paper are that the authors apply the psychological contract framework in analysing the degree to which employees value their occupational pensions, employees themselves are interviewed rather than their employers in assessing the impact of an occupational pension on recruitment and retention, and the paper provides an early assessment to the recent introduction of age discrimination.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how changes in the distribution of pre retirement labour earnings affect post‐retirement income in the UK.

The authors estimate a PROBIT model and perform a counterfactual simulation to assess the effects of changes in the earnings distributions on pensions in the UK. The paper uses data from the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS).

The distribution of labour earnings before retirement plays a considerable role in the pension distribution of current retirees, particularly for low and medium incomes in the period 1991‐2007 for the UK. Improvements in Social Security have lifted many out of poverty; however there is still a gender gap as it is found that the current system of public and private schemes has not substantially improved pension income dispersion among women. On the other hand, changes in labour earning distributions have benefited more poor female pensioners than male.

The paper uses BHPS data, which is a longitudinal panel of survey questions made to UK households between 1991 and 2007. The level of detail of such data allows the study of the complete distributions of pre and post retirement income rather than focussing only on some measures of dispersion.

The aim of this paper is to provide a better understanding of the motivating and hindering factors to setting up sponsored occupational pension schemes in small companies.

The study is conducted in two stages: the first stage is a qualitative study consisting of eight focus groups and the second stage is a quantitative investigation comprising a postal survey of 108 respondents. The themes that guided the focus groups were developed through a review of existing literature. Those that informed the survey design emerged from the focus group findings.

The findings suggest that the decision to adopt a pension although triggered by a number of factors cannot be divorced from the context of operation of the firm, the market environment, the stage of the company's life cycle, and the general economic conditions. The other important contextual issue that influences the decision is the management's future objectives for the firm and the management style of the owner or owners.

The limitations of this study are the over representation of certain industrial sectors in the sample from which the focus groups were formed, and the rate of response (38.6 per cent) to the survey.

The paper provides useful information on the factors affecting the setting up sponsored occupational pension schemes in small companies.

The purpose of this paper is to examine issues relating to public and private pensions for individuals from some of the major ethnic minority groups in the UK.

The paper draws on data from in‐depth interviews and focus groups with 64 respondents from the six largest ethnic minority groups in the UK, as well as from a white British control group.

The research found that a belief in the need for retirement planning was held by respondents of all backgrounds, that there was a widespread view that state pension should be increased to a more adequate level, and concern amongst some respondents that they would be unable to receive retirement income from pension schemes if they were to retire in another country.

The limitations of the research largely concern the limited sample of respondents (n = 64), the use of English in all interviews and significant reliance on the internet in order to contact potential respondents.

It is suggested that more widespread information about retirement planning is needed in minority ethnic media and that in promoting the forthcoming scheme of Personal Accounts, the government should make clear the extent to which the scheme will allow members to receive retirement income in another country, for those who choose to retire abroad.

The paper contributes new information about attitudes to the forthcoming scheme of Personal Accounts, and explores retirement strategies of ethnic minority individuals in the UK.

The aim of this article is to obtain a better understanding of people's motivation and behaviour with respect to provision for their retirement.

This study examines variation in behaviour and attitudes towards pensions and retirement saving among consumers of financial service products, using data from a questionnaire survey.

A cluster analysis indicates that consumers can be divided into six clusters, with distinctive demographic, economic, behavioural and attitudinal traits for each cluster. Of particular interest is the finding that members of two of the clusters reported a general tendency to be in debt in the short term, whilst at the same time putting money away for retirement through either a company pension or voluntary regular saving.

The data set is composed of people who enquired about products offered by the financial services industry. This makes the findings by definition relevant to marketing pensions and retirement savings products to this set of people. It is not clear to what extent they apply to the population as a whole; this would be a useful further study.

The key contribution of this study is that the identification of target groups could ultimately lead to enhanced abilities for pension providers to develop customised pension and saving products for those groups.

An integral part of government policy is to encourage employees to make financial provision for retirement. This paper asks why eligible employees, particularly women, do not join their company schemes. This two‐stage study uses face to face interviews followed by a survey of 532 employees who have chosen not to become members of their company schemes. Findings highlight personal pension ownership and a requirement for flexibility and pension portability as the key reasons for non‐membership. The dominant reason given by women was the expectation that a partner would provide in retirement.

We investigate the return and volatility spillovers from major UK banks to Financial Times Stock Exchange 100 (FTSE 100) index using Gaussian estimation and continuous time models as well as discrete time multivariate GARCH (MGARCH) modelling approaches. Using daily, weekly and monthly data over the period December 1999–December 2010, which includes the recent 2007–2009 global financial crisis, empirical estimates of uni- and/or bi-directional return and volatility spillovers are provided. The bivariate MGARCH results reveal strong return spillovers from the FTSE to the banks, and no return spillover from the latter to the FTSE. Nevertheless, strong bi-directional volatility transmission is verified. The continuous time analysis provides mixed evidence of feedback effects over the different models.

Having discussed the growth and current status of company occupational pensions and the claimed role of pension provision in fostering employee loyalty to an organisation, this paper reports the findings of a research study that investigated employees’ perceptions of these types of pension scheme, a perspective that has hitherto been somewhat neglected. The findings show that, although employees had joined a company scheme largely automatically as a concomitant of employment, their current assessments of, and concerns about, different aspects of occupational pension schemes are framed in more nuanced, instrumental and individualistic terms: the attractive features of these schemes are not so much those that provide security for the employee as “breadwinner” and their dependants as those that offer a cost‐effective way for the individual to build up a fund for their own, possibly early, retirement. Company pension schemes are seen more as contingent private transactions than as part of long‐term stable commitments by and to an employer. On the basis of this evidence, it is argued that, if the employer is perceived as merely one possible pension provider among many, any link between pension provision and employee loyalty or commitment, a link that was always tenuous, is extremely fragile.

This paper aims to examine the investment performance of pension funds in the UK using the three standard performance measurement models, the capital asset pricing model (CAPM), Fama-French model and the Carhart model.

The authors use the CAPS-Mellon survey data for the period 1990-2008 and employ the three standard performance measurement models, the CAPM, Fama-French model and the Carhart model in assessing the investment performance of the pension funds.

The authors show that the abnormal returns of pension funds cannot be fully explained by size, book-to-market values, market returns, momentum and the term spread. The authors find larger abnormal returns in bond than in equity portfolios and that smaller funds outperform larger funds. The paper also shows that the addition of the momentum factor does not improve on the three-factor Fama-French model. The authors find that pension funds exhibit superior performance relative to the linear factor models.

First, this study contributes to the extant literature on pension funds performance. Future research may also extend the authors' work to incorporate economic, tax, political and legal differences across the countries on the performance of pension funds. Second, due to data constraints, this study excludes the default probability of corporate bonds as an additional variable in their tests on bond returns. Future work may add the default probability as an additional variable whilst examining bond returns.

The authors believe that the findings will be considerable food for thought for fund managers who continuously attempt to explore opportunities to provide a higher return to investors.

To the authors' knowledge, this is the first comprehensive study that investigates the performance of UK equity and bond pension funds relative to standard linear factor models such as the CAPM, Fama and French, and Carhart.