April 2024
19Apr

“Safe” Annuity Retirement Products and a Possible US Retirement Crisis

By Thomas E. Lambert & Christopher B. Tobe This paper examines a looming possible crisis in many Americans’ retirement plans due to the proliferation of annuity products in their retirement investment portfolios. As defined benefit pension plans have almost completely disappeared as a means of retirement savings and have been replaced by defined contribution retirement plans over the last 40 to 50 years, a great number of private and public sector defined contribution retirement plans have become laden with insurance...

April 19, 2024
Articles, Pension design, , ,
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12Apr

The Race/Ethnicity Gap in Retirement Plan Participation: More than Just Demographics

By David Blanchett American companies have been actively shifting away from defined benefit (DB) plans towards defined contribution (DC) plans for decades. This shift places more burden on workers to make decisions like whether to participate in the retirement plan, how much to save, and how to invest those savings. This analysis explores how participation in a workforce retirement plan varies by race and ethnicity leveraging data from the Annual Social and Economic Supplement (ASEC) to the 2023 Current Population...

April 12, 2024
Adequacy, Articles, , ,
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12Apr

Latent Cumulative Disadvantage: US Immigrants’ Reversed Economic Assimilation in Later Life

By Leafia Z Ye One of the most salient findings in research on immigration has been that immigrants experience substantial economic mobility as they accumulate more years in the host-society labor force and eventually approach earnings parity with their native-born counterparts. However, we do not know whether this progress is sustained in retirement. In this paper, I develop a framework of Latent Cumulative (Dis)advantage and hypothesize that even as immigrants are approaching parity with the native-born in terms of current...

April 12, 2024
Articles, Labor Market, , , ,
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05Apr

Wealth Creators or Inheritors? Unpacking the Gender Wealth Gap from Bottom to Top and Young to Old

By Eva Sierminska, Charlotte Bartels & Carsten Schroeder There is growing interest in understanding how gender influences the accumulation of wealth. While prior studies have focused on labor-related determinants, our research focuses on inheritances and gifts. Using unique data that over samples the top 1% of wealth holders in Germany, we show that the gender wealth gap is small for individuals up to age 40, then widens, and declines for those past retirement age. Transfer amounts and their timing are...

April 5, 2024
Articles, System Characterization, , , , ,
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05Apr

The Effects of Environmental Distress on Labor Markets: Evidence from Brazil

By Danae Hernandez-Cortes & Sophie Mathes This article documents how environmental distress affects individual-level labor market outcomes in Latin America’s largest economy. We collect data on a broad range of environmental distress events namely heat waves, floods, fires, and droughts, and combine these with uniquely rich administrative information covering the universe of formal employment in Brazil from 2003 to 2017. We find heterogeneous labor effects in response to environmental distress. We find that heat waves disrupt employment, increasing retirement rates...

April 5, 2024
Articles, Labor Market, , , ,
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05Apr

Regressivity in Public Pension Systems: The Case of Peru

By Jose Valderrama We study the role of income-mortality differentials and pension eligibility conditions on the level of regressivity and progressivity of Peru’s public pension system, using administrative records from 1999 to 2018 to do so. We consider the joint effect of insufficient contributions, by which the poorest contribute to the pension system butultimately do not qualify for pensions because of insufficient contributions, and differing mortality by socioeconomic status in contributing to regressivity of the system. We find that the...

April 5, 2024
Articles, Pension design, , , ,
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March 2024
27Mar

Older Workers, Pension Reforms and Firm Outcomes

By Francesca Carta, Francesco D’Amuri & Till Von Wachter Using Italian matched worker-firm data, this paper quantifies the effect of an exogenous increase in older workers driven by an unexpected raise in statutory retirement ages on medium and large firms' input mix and economic outcomes. Data on lifetime pension contributions are used to calculate the expected additional number of older workers retained by each firm due to the pension reform. Instrumental variable estimates show an increase in older workers leads...

March 27, 2024
Aging, Articles, , , ,
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27Mar

Leveraging FinTech Compliance to Mitigate Cryptocurrency Volatility for Secure US Employee Retirement Benefits: Bitcoin ETF Case Study

By Samuel Oladiipo Olabanji, Tunbosun Oyewale Oladoyinbo, Christopher Uzoma Asonze, Chinasa Adigwe, Olalekan J Okunleye & Oluwaseun Oladeji Olaniyi The integration of cryptocurrencies, particularly Bitcoin, into retirement savings plans has recently garnered significant attention. This interest has been amplified by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission's approval of Bitcoin Exchange-Traded Funds (ETFs) in January 2024 and Fidelity Investments' decision to include Bitcoin in their 401(k) plans. These landmark developments represent a paradigm shift in retirement investment strategies, merging traditional financial...

March 27, 2024
Articles, Pension design, , ,
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27Mar

Autonomy or Delegation, Libertarianism or Paternalism: What I Like for Myself and What I Like for Others on Pension Savings

By Carmen Sainz Villalba By using an online survey conducted with Bilendi&Respondi, we correlate the variables of people’s perception of howdifferent they are from others with respect to their pension plan preferences, how informed they are about financial matters in general, and what are their preferences toward the government intervention of savings plans. The empirical approach is inspired by theory results of Konrad (2023). His game-theory analysis suggest that two factors increase the citizen’s desire for autonomous economic decision-making: eccentricity...

March 27, 2024
Articles, Savings, , ,
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22Mar

The Riccati Tontine: How to Satisfy Regulators on Average

By Moshe A. Milevsky & T. S. Salisbury This paper presents a new type of modern accumulation-based tontine, called the Riccati tontine, named after two Italians: mathematician Jacobo Riccati (b. 1676, d. 1754) and financier Lorenzo di Tonti (b. 1602, d. 1684). The Riccati tontine is yet another way of pooling and sharing longevity risk, but is different from competing designs in two key ways. The first is that in the Riccati tontine, the representative investor is expected -- although...

March 22, 2024
Articles, Pension design, ,
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