April 2021

Understanding Social Insurance: Risk and Value Pluralism in the Early British Welfare State

By Rachel Friedman This article seeks to make two contributions to the understanding of social insurance, a central policy tool of the modern welfare state. Focusing on Britain, it locates an important strand of theoretical support for early social insurance programs in antecedent developments in mathematical probability and statistics. While by no means the only source of support for social insurance, it argues that these philosophical developments were among the preconditions for the emergence of welfare policies. In addition, understanding...

March 2021

Public Pensions and Private Savings

By Esteban García-Miralles, Jonathan Leganza How does the provision of public pension benefits impact private savings? We answer this question in the context of a reform in Denmark that altered old-age benefit payouts through a discontinuous increase in pension eligibility ages contingent on birthdate. Using detailed administrative data and a regression discontinuity design, we identify the causal effects of the policy, leveraging our setting to study essentially the entire financial portfolio. We document responses over two distinct time horizons. First,...

How Much Taxes Will Retirees Owe on Their Retirement Income?

By Anqi Chen, Alicia H. Munnell To evaluate their retirement resources, households approaching retirement will examine their Social Security statements, defined benefit pensions, defined contribution balances, and other financial assets. However, many households may forget that not all of these resources belong to them; they will need to pay some portion to federal and state government in taxes. It is unclear, however, just how large the tax burden is for the typical retired household and for households with different income...

A Guide to the Treatment of Pensions on Divorce

By Pension Advisory Group The publication of this final report from the Pension Advisory Group is an important and very welcome event. The importance of the work is demonstrated by the fact that a good many busy and experienced practitioners have given up valuable time over the course of the past two years to produce this definitive guidance on the approach to the issue of pensions in Financial Remedy cases before the Family Court. For too long the division of...

The PEPP Contribution to the Capital Markets Union (CMU)

By Jorik van Zanden, Hans van Meerten, Andrea Minto The EU has several ‘pension problems, for example ageing, poor portability and the lack of consumer protection. Furthermore, the EU internal market for pensions is not sufficiently developed. This not only prevents, for example, a cost-efficient pension build-up of an employee working abroad, but the differences among national rule also restrict a local pension participant in choosing a pension fund established abroad. All these problems have been recently pointed out in the...

“Pensions for women, the challenges ahead. International Women’s Day Selection of News and Research”

UK. Pension challenges women face will impact on their retirement 03/12/21 March 8 marks International Women’s Day and celebrates the social, economic, cultural and political achievements of women. Ghana. Low financial literacy responsible for low patronage of pensions by women and informal workers 03/12/21 A Compliance officer with the National Pensions Regulatory Authority (NPRA) says low financial literacy is the cause of low patronage of the pension scheme among women and people in the informal sector. Taking a workforce break to raise children...

Towards Improved Retirement Savings Outcomes for Women

By OECD Labour market inequalities are well-known to be the main drivers of the gender pension gap. This publication focuses on helping governments find solutions for retirement savings arrangements that do not further exacerbate these inequalities. This study first analyses why the gender pension gap exists and sheds light on some of the behavioural and cultural factors that contribute to these inequalities. Country case studies assess how demographics, labour markets and other factors may affect gaps in pension coverage, assets...

Pension Trends for Executives in FTSE 350 & SmallCap Companies 2020

By e-reward.co.uk In this research, we outline: How contribution rates vary across the UK’s three main indices. The level of contribution rates paid to the majority of staff in the UK’s largest companies. Some of the approaches that individual companies have followed to reduce the pensions of their new and existing directors. Our data is sourced from over 1,200 annual reports published between September 2017 and 2020 from companies listed on the FTSE 100, mid-250 and SmallCap indices. This data represents...

Pension Information and Women’s Awareness

By Marta Angelici, Daniela Del Boca, Noemi Oggero, Paola Profeta, Maria Christina Rossi, Claudia Villosio We explore the role of financial and pension information in increasing women’s knowledge and awareness of their future pension status, and consequently, in reducing the gender pension gap. A representative sample of 1249 Italian working women were interviewed to assess their knowledge about pensions and financial issues and about their own savings and personal wealth planned for retirement. The responses showed that their knowledge and...

February 2021