April 2017
14Apr

How Can China Provide Income Security for its Rapidly Aging Population?

By Barry James, Estelle Kane & Che Friedman The authors discuss key choices policy makers face about China's pension system in the face of a rapidly aging population. They describe the problems the current pay-as-you-go system faces in the near and long term and simulate policy options for solving those problems. They find that simple design changes are necessary but not sufficient conditions for making the pension system sustainable. Partial funding is necessary to avoid large increases in future contribution...

April 14, 2017
Aging, Articles, Pension design, Regulation, , ,
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10Apr

We are Not All the Same: Key Law, Policy and Practice Strategies for Improving the Lives of Older Women in the Lower Mainland

By Canadian Centre for Elder Law (British Columbia Law Institute) In 2011 the Canadian Centre for Elder law (CCEL) started the Older Women’s Dialogue Project (OWDP) to identify and take action on barriers to the well-being of older women. While gender has a significant impact on life experience, research and policy analysis often renders older women invisible: feminist inquiry tends to focus on girls and women of child-bearing age and gender-neutral aging policy concentrates on the experiences of men. The...

April 10, 2017
Aging, Articles, Labor Market
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10Apr

Closing Routes to Retirement: How Do People Respond?

By Johannes Geyer & Clara Welteke (German Institute for Economic Research) We present quasi-experimental evidence on the employment effects of an unprecedented large increase in the early retirement age (ERA). Raising the ERA has the potential to extend contribution periods and to reduce the number of pension beneficiaries at the same time, if employment exits are successfully delayed. However, workers may not be able to work longer or may choose other social support programs as exit routes from employment. We...

April 10, 2017
Aging, Articles, Labor Market, Regulation, ,
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03Apr

Approximate Solutions to Retirement Spending Problems and the Optimality of Ruin

By Faisal Habib, Huang Huaxiong & Moshe A. Milevsky (York University) Milevsky and Huang (2011) investigated the optimal retirement spending policy for a utility-maximizing retiree facing a stochastic lifetime but assuming deterministic investment returns. They solved the problem using techniques from the calculus of variations and derived analytic expressions for the optimal spending rate and wealth depletion time under the Gompertz law of mortality. Of course, in the real world financial returns are stochastic as well as lifetimes, raising the...

April 3, 2017
Aging, Articles, Regulation, ,
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March 2017

27Mar

Towards an Equitable and Sustainable Points System: A Proposal for Pension Reform in Belgium

By Erik Schokkaert (Catholic University of Leuven), Pierre Devolder (Catholic University of Louvain), Jean Hindriks (University of London) & Frank Vandenbroucke (University of Amsterdam) We describe the points system that has been proposed by the Belgian Commission for Pension Reform 2020-2040. Intragenerational equity can be realised in a flexible and transparent way through the allocation of points within a cohort. The intergenerational distribution is determined by fixing the value of a point for the newly retired and a sustainability parameter...

March 27, 2017
Aging, Articles, Labor Market, System Sustainability, , , ,
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17Mar

Widowhood and Retirement Timing: Evidence from the Health and Retirement Study

By Philipp Schreiber (University of Mannheim) The combination of an increasing life expectancy, low fertility rates, and an early effective retirement age creates pressure to act for Governments and organizations. The pay-as-you-go social security systems of many countries are troubled by the increasing ratio of retirees to working people. In addition, many organizations face difficulties caused by a shrinking workforce and the accompanied shortage of skilled workers. To counteract, it is essential to create an environment in which older workers...

March 17, 2017
Aging, Articles, Labor Market, System Sustainability, ,
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17Mar

Risks in Advanced Age

By Michael A. Guillemette (Texas Tech University) • This article outlines risks retirees face and possible solutions to help them overcome behavioral hurdles. • A preference for certainty has been observed in advanced age and older defined contribution investors exhibit equity-varying risk aversion. • Clients face declining cognitive ability over time, which corresponds with a decrease in investment performance. • Financial literacy skills decline in advanced age but confidence does not, which may lead to older clients being overconfident in their financial...

March 17, 2017
Aging
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February 2017

28Feb

Retirement Spending and Biological Age

By Huang Huaxiong, Moshe A. Milevsky & T. S. Salisbury (York University) Abstract:     We solve a retirement lifecycle model in which the consumer's age does not move in lockstep with calendar time. Instead, biological age increases at a stochastic non-linear rate in chronological age, which one can think of as working with a clock that occasionally moves backwards in time. Our paper is inspired by the growing body of medical literature that has identified biomarkers of aging which --...

February 28, 2017
Adequacy, Aging, Articles, Savings, , , , , ,
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28Feb

Social Security and the Rise in Health Spending

By Kai Zhao (University of Connecticut) Abstract:     In a quantitative model of Social Security with endogenous health, I argue that Social Security increases the aggregate health spending of the economy because it redistributes resources to the elderly whose marginal propensity to spend on health is high. I show by using computational experiments that the expansion of US Social Security can account for over a third of the dramatic rise in US health spending from 1950 to 2000. In addition,...

February 28, 2017
Aging, Articles, Savings, , ,
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23Feb

Health, Health Insurance, and Retirement: A Survey

By Eric French & John Bailey Jones (Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond) Abstract:      The degree to which retirement decisions are driven by health is a key concern for both academics and policymakers. In this paper we survey the economic literature on the health-retirement link in developed countries. We describe the mechanisms through which health affects labor supply and discuss how they interact with public pensions and public health insurance. The historical evidence suggests that health is not the...

February 23, 2017
Aging, Labor Market, Pension design, ,
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