April 2024

Progress and priorities: reviewing sustainability in key pension systems

Pension funds are long-term investors and their ability to generate long-term returns relies on the performance of the markets and economies in which they invest. Because sustainability factors such as climate change and biodiversity loss threaten the performance of the markets and economies on which they rely for financial returns, pension funds have a responsibility to consider whether sustainability-related risks will inhibit their ability to protect long-term value and provide an adequate pension to their members or beneficiaries. Accordingly,...

February 2024

Closing the Gap: The Role of Public Pensions in Reducing Retirement Inequality

By Nari Rhee This study analyzes the impact of defined benefit pensions, especially public pensions, on retirement income security and wealth distribution by race, gender, and educational attainment in the U.S. It serves as a companion report to Closing the Gap fact sheets, which are designed to inform the public about the social equity impact of pensions in each state and the District of Columbia. Get the report here

The Purpose of Pensions

By Tom Shields & Jesse Griffiths  The pensions the system needs major reform: it is not delivering decent, secure retirement incomes for all, it excludes far too many, and it is not playing a big enough role in delivering a just, green transition, or supporting an inclusive, sustainable and productive economy. This paper reviews all proposals for change, and recommends five key sets of reforms that could ensure that the pensions system works for people, the economy, and the environment. Get...

Redistributive effects of pension reforms: who are the winners and losers?

By Miguel Sánchez-Romero, Philip Schuster & Alexia Prskawetz As the heterogeneity in life expectancy by socioeconomic status increases, many pension systems imply a wealth transfer from short- to long-lived individuals. Various pension reforms aim to reduce inequalities that are caused by ex-ante differences in life expectancy. However, these pension reforms may induce redistribution effects. We introduce a dynamic general equilibrium-overlapping generations model with heterogeneous individuals that differ in their education, labor supply, lifetime income, and life expectancy. Within this framework we...

January 2024

Pension Systems (Un)Sustainability and Fiscal Constraints: A Comparative Analysis

By Michael Wickens  Using an overlapping generations model, two new indicators of public pension system sustainability are proposed: the pension space, which measures the capacity to pay for pension expenditures out of labour taxation, and the pension space exhaustion probability reflecting demographic uncertainties. These measures reveal that the pension spaces of advanced economies are strikingly different. Most nations have little scope to further finance pensions out of labour income  taxation over the next thirty years. There is no one-size-fits-all solution....

December 2023

Charting a Course Towards Universal Social Protection: Resilience, Equity, and Opportunity for All

By World Bank Group Charting a Course Towards Universal Social Protection: Resilience, Equity, and Opportunity for All, known as the Social Protection and Jobs Compass updates the World Bank strategy for social protection amid rapid change both within the sector and beyond. The Compass puts at its heart the vision of universal social protection. It recognizes that the progressive realization of universal social protection, which ensures access to social protection for all whenever and however they need it, is critical...

October 2023

Artificial Intelligence Policy: A Primer and Roadmap

By Ryan Calo Talk of artificial intelligence is everywhere. People marvel at the capacity of machines to translate any language and master any game. Others condemn the use of secret algorithms to sentence criminal defendants or recoil at the prospect of machines gunning for blue, pink, and white-collar jobs. Some worry aloud that artificial intelligence will be humankind’s “final invention.” This essay, prepared in connection with UC Davis Law Review's 50th anniversary symposium, explains why AI is suddenly on everyone's mind and...

August 2023

Public Employee Pensions and Municipal Insolvency

By Sean Myers  This paper studies how municipal governments jointly manage spending, credit market borrowing, and public employee pensions. I model governments as levered investors who must meet non-defaultable pension obligations and may value government spending more than citizens. I quantify the model using California city-level data, including a new record of fiscal emergencies, tax increases required to maintain essential services. After the financial crisis depleted pension funds, cities engaged in excessive risk-taking: the fiscal emergency option encouraged gambling for...

June 2023

Sustainability of pension schemes. Building a smooth automatic balance mechanism with an application to the US social security

By Frédéric Gannon, Florence Legros & Vincent Touzé We build a “smooth” automatic balancing mecanism (S-ABM) which would result from an optimal tradeoff between increasing the receipts and reducing the expenditures of a pension scheme. The S-ABM obtains from minimizing a sum of discounted quadratic loss function under the constraint of an intertemporal budget balance. One advantage of this model of “optimal” adjustment is its ability to analyse various configurations in terms of ABMs by controlling the adjustment pace. Notably,...

A Complaint Template for Legal Challenges to the Validity of the Statutory ‘Debt Ceiling’

By Robert C. Hockett The Statutory ‘Debt Ceiling’ appearing at 31 USC 3101(b), rooted in the Second Liberty Bond Act of 1917 aimed at expanding Treasury financing options during the First World War, is not valid in any application that would occasion default on U.S. sovereign debt, other contractual obligations, or Social Security or Veterans’ pension obligations. There are at least seven mutually reinforcing legal grounds for so saying. These include preemption of such application of the Ceiling by the...