Rate My Professor Joachim Inkmann

Joachim Inkmann is an Associate Professor in the Department of Finance in the Faculty of Business and Economics at the University of Melbourne, where he holds positions as Deputy Honours Coordinator (Finance), Working Paper Series Coordinator, and Brown Bag Seminar Convener. A Fellow of Netspar and Editor at the Journal of Pension Economics & Finance, Inkmann studied economics at the University of Göttingen and the University of Mannheim before obtaining his doctoral degree in economics from the University of Konstanz with a thesis on applied econometrics. His professional experience includes consulting for the Pension Advisory group of Siemens Financial Services in Munich, where he advised trustees of large defined benefit pension plans in Europe and the United States on asset liability management. He has also been associated with the UBS Pensions Research Programme hosted by the Financial Markets Group at the London School of Economics and with Netspar at Tilburg University.

Inkmann's research interests center on household finance and pensions. He investigates normative questions such as optimal household investment over the life cycle and positive questions regarding the ability of theory to explain observed household investment behavior. By integrating theoretical models with empirical research, his work informs policies on default funds for defined contribution pension plans and regulation of defined benefit pension plans. Key publications encompass "Intra-Household Risk Sharing in Collective Portfolio Choice Models" (working paper, 2026, with A. Michaelides and Y. Zhang), "Estimating Background Risk Hedging Demands from Cross-Sectional Data" (Journal of Financial Research, 2025, with J. Brugler and A. Rizzo), "Aggregate Portfolio Choice" (Journal of Empirical Finance, 2024), "Managing Financially Distressed Pension Plans in the Interest of Beneficiaries" (Journal of Risk and Insurance, 2017, with D. Blake and Z. Shi), "Life-Cycle Patterns in the Design and Adoption of Default Funds in DC Pension Plans" (Journal of Pension Economics & Finance, 2016, with Z. Shi), "Can the Life Insurance Market Provide Evidence for a Bequest Motive?" (Journal of Risk and Insurance, 2012, with A. Michaelides), and "How Deep is the Annuity Market Participation Puzzle?" (Review of Financial Studies, 2011, with P. Lopes and A. Michaelides). He is also the author of the book "Conditional Moment Estimation of Nonlinear Equation Systems - With an Application to an Oligopoly Model of Cooperative R&D" (Lecture Notes in Economics and Mathematical Systems, Springer, 2001).