November 2019

25Nov

US. States embrace nudge theory to promote retirement savings

A new government program that takes money out of people’s paycheck is gaining interest in state legislatures across the country — in part because it is wildly popular with voters. Oregon, Illinois and California have launched initiatives to create retirement savings accounts for residents whose employers do not offer company-sponsored programs. In those states, tens of thousands of workers have saved more than $40 million for their own retirements. The programs automatically divert 5 percent...

November 25, 2019
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12Nov

Nigeria. Micro pension: Gaining traction amid challenges

While the Contributory Pension Scheme (CPS) has been fully established and to a large extent taken care of workers in the formal sector including public and private establishments, the micro-pension plan for the informal sector came on-board fully this year with a major launch by the Federal Government. Read also Poland Approves Plans to Overhaul Pension System The scheme, which went through the usual teething problem associated with every new programme, has, however, appeared to be taking shape...

November 12, 2019
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06Nov

Automating Emergency Savings for Retirement Plan Participants

At any given time, 20% of retirement plan participants have an outstanding loan from their workplace retirement plan, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research. “Loan overutilization is one of the biggest problems plaguing retirement plans,” says Michael Webb, vice president of Cammack Retirement Group in New York City. “Many people are living paycheck to paycheck and have no emergency savings. Plan sponsors are concerned about this and don’t really know how to deal with the problem....

November 6, 2019
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October 2019

18Oct

Pensioners sleep outside Zimbabwe banks as savings vanish again

As hundreds of pensioners line up outside a bank in central Harare in the hope of collecting their pensions, military veteran Elias Nyabunzi has a sense that he has seen this all before. If there is cash available, he will collect the equivalent of just $26, down from the $400 he was getting a few months back. A decade ago when he went to collect the lump sum he was also entitled to after 25 years in the army...

October 18, 2019
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August 2019

30Aug

Using Vignettes to Improve Understanding of Social Security and Annuities

By Anya Samek, Arie Kapteyn, Andre Gray Evidence shows that people have difficulty understanding complex aspects of retirement planning, which leads them to under-utilize annuities and claim Social Security benefits earlier than is optimal. To target this problem, we developed vignettes about the consequences of different annuitization and claiming decisions. We evaluated our vignettes using an experiment with a representative online panel of nearly 2,000 Americans. In our experiment, respondents were either assigned to a control group with no...

August 30, 2019
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July 2019

02Jul

Bulgaria. More than 2,130,000 Pensioners Will Receive an Increase of 5.7% on Their Pensions From Today

More than 2,130,000 pensioners will receive an increase of 5.7 percent on their pensions from today - 1 July. The change is in compliance with the Social Insurance Code provided for by all pension payments granted starting with 31 December 2018. This was announced by the National Social Security Institute.An increase by the same percentage of today will also apply to pensions that are equated to the minimum amount for the type of pension, including those granted in 2019....

July 2, 2019
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June 2019

07Jun

Retire In-Home: A New Way to Use a Home to Guarantee Retirement Income

By Arun Muralidhar There is a growing retirement crisis and most of the focus has been on the fact that individuals are not saving enough for retirement, may not have access to pension schemes, and find it difficult to choose from a wide range of retirement products. One solution that has been considered is to improve access to Reverse Mortgages (RMs) so that individuals can convert their (possibly) single largest asset into a through-death income stream. However, current RMs are...

June 7, 2019
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March 2019

25Mar

Can an Ageing Workforce Explain Low Inflation?

By Benoît Mojon (Bank for International Settlements (BIS)) & Xavier Ragot (Banque de France) Why is wage inflation so weak in spite of the recent sharp reduction in unemployment? We show that this may be due to an ongoing change in the composition of the labor supply. Indeed, the participation rate of workers aged between 55 and 64 has increased steadily over the last decade, from a third to above a half on average across OECD countries. This is most...

March 25, 2019
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03Mar

The Costs and Benefits of Caring: Aggregate Burdens of an Aging Population

By Finn Kydland (Carnegie Mellon University - David A. Tepper School of Business; Norwegian School of Economics (NHH) - Department of Economics), Nick Pretnar (Carnegie Mellon University) Throughout the 21st century, population aging in the United States will lead to increases in the number of elderly people requiring some form of living assistance which, as some argue, is to be seen as a burden on society, straining old-age insurance systems and requiring younger agents to devote an increasing fraction of...

March 3, 2019
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February 2019

15Feb

Pension Policy and the Financial System

By DAVID S. SCHARFSTEIN This paper examines the effect of pension policy on the structure of financial systems around the world. In particular, I explore the hypothesis that policies that promote pension savings also promote the development of capital markets. I present a model that endogenizes the extent to which savings are intermediated through banks or capital markets, and derive implications for corporate finance, household finance, banking, and the size of the financial sector. I then present a...

February 15, 2019
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