March 2023

Sustainable Investment: Best Practice Disclosure Checklist for Pension Funds

By World Bank Group There are compelling reasons for asset owners – in particular large pension funds and sovereign wealth funds – to adopt sustainable investment, and for governments to support them in these endeavours. First, asset owners have a key role to play in providing the capital that supports national economic and development goals. Second, sustainability issues – for example, climate change, labour rights, public health – are important drivers of investment value. Third, asset owners play a key...

Does Common Ownership Affect Employee Welfare? Evidence from Corporate Pension Funding

By Charles Hsu, Zhiming Ma & Kaitang Zhou This study examines the effect of common institutional ownership on corporate pension funding. We posit that a common owner’s incentive to maximize shareholder value may come at the cost of employee welfare. Consistent with this prediction, we find robust evidence that firms with common ownership demonstrate greater pension underfunding than firms without common ownership. This effect increases with firms’ value-added activities, common owners’ shareholding, duration of ownership, and portfolio size. It decreases...

ESG and Climate Change: Pension Fund Dos and Don’ts

By Randy Bauslaugh Pension fund administrators have a fiduciary duty to prudently manage financial risks and opportunities when investing plan assets and when managing plan operations that are paid from the pension fund. This includes the financial risks and opportunities associated with climate change and other environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues. But what are the legal dos and don’ts? Plan fiduciaries will always be on solid legal ground if they take ESG information into account for financial purposes – to...

Frames, Incentives, and Education: Effectiveness of Interventions to Delay Public Pension Claiming

By Franca Glenzer, Pierre-Carl Michaud & Stefan Staubli Many people forgo a higher stream of public pension income by claiming early. We provide both quasi-experimental and survey-experimental evidence that the timing of public pension claiming is relatively inelastic to changes in financial incentives in Canada. Using the survey experiment, we evaluate the effect of two different educational interventions and different ways of framing the incentive to delay claiming. While all three types of interventions induce delays, these interventions have heterogeneous...

México Ratifica Convención Interamericana Sobre La Protección De Los Derechos Humanos De Las Personas Mayores

La secretaria de Bienestar, Ariadna Montiel Reyes, destaca que el artículo 4 de la Constitución “no es letra muerta” y garantiza la pensión universal a más de 11 millones de personas adultas mayores en el país La secretaria de Bienestar, Ariadna Montiel Reyes, celebró el depósito del instrumento de ratificación de la Convención Interamericana sobre la Protección de los Derechos Humanos de las Personas Mayores, con el cual, México alcanza la meta de garantizar el derecho a la seguridad social...

España. El Congreso da luz verde a la reforma de las pensiones pese a los obstáculos de la derecha

Euforia en el seno del Gobierno, resistencia en la derecha. Estas son las dos posturas que se han podido ver este jueves en el hemiciclo a la luz de la resolución del Pleno del Congreso, que ha dado luz verde de forma definitiva a la reforma de las pensiones planteada por el ministerio de José Luis Escrivá y que ha contado con una holgada mayoría gracias al amplio apoyo de los socios, incluido Unidas Podemos. Así, la mejora de...

Chile. Superintendencia detalla inversión de los fondos de pensiones en Credit Suisse y UBS

La Superintendencia de Pensiones entregó este miércoles información detallada de la exposición de los fondos de pensiones a instrumentos financieros de los bancos Credit Suisse y UBS, actualizados al 28 de febrero de 2023. Cabe recordar que hace unas semanas, UBS acordó comprar a Credit Suisse debido a la delicada situación financiera de esta última entidad. De acuerdo con los datos del regulador previsional, los ahorros para las pensiones administradas por las AFP “no tenían inversión directa en acciones ni en...

México. Tiran cobro bancario en cuenta de pensión

La Suprema Corte de Justicia rechazó ayer los cobros directos de deudas bancarias sobre las cuentas donde se depositan pensiones de personas jubiladas. Por cuatro votos contra uno, la Primera Sala amparó a un pensionado del ISSSTE que demandó a su banco por haber cobrado una antigua deuda de tarjeta de crédito, directamente sobre la cuenta en la cual el mismo banco había depositado el primer pago de su pensión. Si bien el Poder Judicial censuró el nombre del banco en...

The economic — and political — consequences of reforming France’s pensions

Earlier this month, French President Emmanuel Macron followed through on his long-touted promise to reform the country’s pension system, raising the retirement age from 62 to 64. How he did it though — essentially forcing the legislation through without a vote in the lower house of parliament — hit a nerve. Since then, over a million people have taken to the streets across France; social media has been filled with images of uncollected garbage piling on the streets of Paris...

UK confirms delay in lifting of state pension age to 68

The UK government has confirmed it will not bring forward a rise in the state pension age to 68, saying a review of the policy will be delayed until after the next general election. The state pension is at present 66 for men and women, rising to 67 from 2026. It had been due to gradually rise to 68 from 2037, under plans first announced by ministers in 2017. But Mel Stride, work and pensions secretary, told MPs on Thursday that...