PhD student in Employment Relations and Organisational Behaviour
Biography
After graduating with a bachelor's degree in Automotive Engineering at Chulalongkorn University with the highest overall GPA among students in the Mechanical Department, Roongkiat pursued an MSc in Management at LSE because of a strong interest in the business strategy and management fields. At LSE, he came to realise that he would like to study a PhD programme in a field related to finance. He therefore decided to complete another master's degree in Quantitative Finance at Cass Business School in order to enhance his knowledge of derivatives pricing and asset management.
With his strong backgrounds in management and finance Roongkiat joined LSE as a doctoral student in September 2009 to research pension provisions and pension fund management, receiving a three-year scholarship from Pension Corporation to pursue the programme. His research projects focus on longevity risk and demographic transition risk, both of which are expected to have substantial impact on the sustainability of the pension schemes - both unfunded Pay-As-You-Go (PAYG) systems and funded Defined Benefit (DB) and Defined Contribution (DC) Plans.
His current research focuses on the demographic shifts especially in developed countries which are facing an ample increase in the dependency ratio - numbers of retirees per working-age individual - because of both unexpected increase in life expectancy of the elderly and low fertility rates. This phenomenon is expected to have a profound impact on the sustainability and adequacy of pension benefits of both funded and unfunded pension schemes.
There have been various attempts to investigate the significance of demographic transitions toward the capital market however no consensus has been reached on whether the "Market Meltdown Hypothesis", that is, the market prices of assets will largely declined when a large pool of baby-boom generation retires and sales their assets to a smaller pool of working-age cohorts for consumptions in their retirement period, will happen in the near future. Roongkiat is primarily interested in examining the true underlying mechanisms of the demographic structure towards the capital and labour market which, in turn, affect the viability of the current pension system.
Roongkiat attempts to explore this mechanism by developing model that demonstrate how demographic transitions affecting on the evolution of interest rates, inflation rates and risk premiums through the investment strategy implemented by pension fund managers. He argues that investment behaviour of pension funds will largely affect prices of certain asset classes since pension funds are becoming one of the largest investors in the capital market. He will also attempt to study the withdrawal behaviour of pensioners. This research will provide framework to estimate the withdrawal rate of the pension funds which affect the inflow and outflow patterns of the funds. Simulation of projected retirement wealth of each cohort in the future will be conducted in order to illustrate how severity of the changing demographic patterns. The simulation results will provide insight on whether the current pension system of unfunded PAYG and funded DB and DC schemes can be sustained and what aspects that the demographic transitions have an impact on. The "Market Meltdown Hypothesis" can be tested by the simulation as well.
Research Interests
Subject areas: Pension provisions, Pension fund management, Demographic shifts impact on capital market, Optimal asset allocation strategy, Asset-liability modelling, Longevity risk management, Mortality rate projection models
Supervisors