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August 2017

The Role of Self-Control on Retirement Preparedness of US Households

By Kyoung Tae Kim (University of Alabama), Jae Min Lee (Minnesota State University) & Eunice O. Hong (Sungshin Women's University) We examine the self-control problems of U.S households and their effects on households’ retirement preparedness based on the Behavioral Life-Cycle Hypothesis. Using the 2010 Survey of Consumer Finances dataset, the level of retirement adequacy was estimated with income replacement ratio (IRR), and only 42% of households were adequately prepared for retirement. Results from logistic regression analysis indicated that households with...

How Do Local Labor Markets Affect Retirement?

By Leora Friedberg (University of Virginia), Michael Owyang (Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis), Wei Sun (Renmin University of China) & Anthony Webb (Boston College) Compared with prime-age workers, older workers face an easier path out of the labor force if they lose their jobs during a recession. However, premature job exits or earnings losses in the years leading up to retirement may be particularly devastating to retirement savings. The authors analyze the impact of recent business cycles on retirement...

July 2017

Pension Funds, Capital Markets, and the Power of Diversification

By Fiona Stewart & Inna Remizova (World Bank); Romain Despalins (OECD) The potential for pension funds to contribute to capital markets and thereby economic growth has been argued on a theoretical basis and demonstrated empirically. However, reforms fostering the development of funded pension systems have not had the economic impact hoped for in some countries. Pension fund portfolios in some cases have remained highly exposed to shorter-term assets, such as bank deposits and shorter-term government bonds. This, in turn, has led to relatively...

Optimal Longevity Risk Transfer and Investment Strategies

By Samuel H. Cox (University of Manitoba), Yijia Lin (University of Nebraska) & Sheen Liu (Washington State University) Given the rising cost of maintaining defined benefit (DB) pensions, there has been a surge of activities in recent years by DB plan sponsors to transfer their pension risk through strategies such as buy-ins and buy-outs. As buy-in and buy-out transaction pipelines grow, insurers actively participating in the buy-in and buy-out markets are exposed to significant longevity risk embedded in pension schemes....

Pension Funds and the Impact of Switching Regulation on Long-Term Investment

By Alvaro Pedraza & Fiona Stewart (World Bank); Olga Fuentes & Pamela Searle (Superintendencia de Pensiones) This paper looks at the impact of members' ability to switch pension fund provider and/or portfolio on the allocation of pension funds to long-term investments. The level of annual turnover in pension fund portfolios was compared with the amount of short-term investments (using government treasury bills and bank deposits as proxy). The investment regulations around switching and other market conduct were then considered. The...

The Evolution of Social Security Research

By Mario Arturo Ruiz Estrada (University of Malaya) & Evangelos Koutronas (Social Security Research Centre) This article examines the evolution of social security research from a theoretical and empirical perspective. This is done through an extensive review and analysis of publications from the Journal of International Social Security Review published by Wiley within a 50-year period (1967-2017). It was observed that at a different period in time, the social security research focused on different national and international issues that invoked...

Life-Cycle Earnings Curves and Safe Savings Rates

By Derek Tharp (Kansas State University) & Michael E. Kitces (The Kitces Report & Nerd's Eye View) Traditional analyses of recommended savings ratios and safe savings rates (SSRs) typically assume constant real earnings growth throughout the one’s career. However, data on the life-cycle earnings patterns of millions of U.S. workers suggests that earnings growth does not occur at a constant rate that matches inflation. Instead, earnings tend to increase at a decreasing rate during the early years of one’s career...

Retirement Security in an Aging Society

By James M. Poterba The share of the U.S. population over the age of 65 was 8.1 percent in 1950, 12.4 percent in 2000, and is projected to reach 20.9 percent by 2050. The percent over 85 is projected to more than double from current levels, reaching 4.2 percent by mid-century. The aging of the U.S. population makes issues of retirement security increasingly important. Elderly individuals exhibit wide disparities in their sources of income. For those in the bottom half of...

Liquidity and Solvency in Pay-as-You-Go Defined Contribution Pension Schemes: A Continuous OLG Sustainability Framework

By Jennifer Alonso-García (University of New South Wales) & Pierre Devolder (Catholic University of Louvain) Notional Defined Contribution pension schemes are defined contribution plans which are pay-as-you-go financed. From a design viewpoint, the countries where NDCs have been implemented cannot guarantee sustainability due to the choice of notional return paid to the contributions and the indexation rate paid to pensions. We study how the scheme should be designed to achieve liquidity and solvency with a limited set of assumptions in...

How Hard Should We Push the Poor to Save for Retirement?

By Andrew G. Biggs (American Enterprise Institute) More than half of U.S. states are working to establish programs what would automatically enrollment in Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs) workers who are not offered a retirement plan by their employer. These programs are designed to address a perceived shortfall of retirement saving, particularly among low-wage workers who are less likely to be offered an employer-sponsored plan. But the designers of state-run auto-IRA plans fail to consider three questions: Do the poor need...