February 2017

04Feb

Do Savings Increase in Response to Salient Information about Retirement and Expected Pensions?

By Mathias Dolls, Philipp Doerrenberg, Andreas Peichl & Holger Stichnoth How can retirement savings be increased? We explore a unique policy change in the context of the German pension system to study this question. As of 2004, the German pension authority started to send out annual letters providing detailed and comprehensible information about the pension system and individual expected pension payments. This reform did not change the level of pensions, but only manipulated the knowledge about and salience of expected...

February 4, 2017
Articles, Labor Market, Savings
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04Feb

The Political Economy of Underfunded Municipal Pension Plans

By Jeffrey Brinkman, Daniele Coen-Pirani & Holger Sieg This paper analyzes the determinants of underfunding of local government's pension funds using a politico-economic overlapping generations model. We show that a binding downpayment constraint in the housing market dampens capitalization of future taxes into current land prices. Thus, a local government's pension funding policy matters for land prices and the utility of young households. Underfunding arises in equilibrium if the pension funding policy is set by the old generation. Young households...

February 4, 2017
Articles, Corporate Governance, System Sustainability,
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04Feb

What You Don’t Know Can’t Help You: Pension Knowledge and Retirement Decision-Making

By Sewin Chan & Ann Huff Stevens This paper provides an answer to an important empirical puzzle in the retirement literature: while most people know little about their own pension plans, retirement behavior is strongly affected by pension incentives. We combine administrative and self-reported pension data to measure the retirement response to actual and perceived financial incentives and document an important role for self-reported pension data in determining retirement behavior. Well-informed individuals are far more responsive to pension incentives than...

February 4, 2017
Articles, Investing, Labor Market, Savings, , ,
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04Feb

What You Don't Know Can't Help You: Pension Knowledge and Retirement Decision-Making

By Sewin Chan & Ann Huff Stevens This paper provides an answer to an important empirical puzzle in the retirement literature: while most people know little about their own pension plans, retirement behavior is strongly affected by pension incentives. We combine administrative and self-reported pension data to measure the retirement response to actual and perceived financial incentives and document an important role for self-reported pension data in determining retirement behavior. Well-informed individuals are far more responsive to pension incentives than...

February 4, 2017
Articles, Investing, Labor Market, Savings, , ,
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04Feb

An Evaluation of the Life Cycle Effects of Minimum Pensions on Retirement Behavior

By Sergi Jiménez-Martín & Alfonso R. Sánchez Martín In this paper we explore the effects of the minimum pension program on welfare and retirement in Spain. This is done with a stylized life cycle model which provides a convenient analytical characterization of optimal behavior. We use data from the Spanish Social Security to estimate the behavioral parameters of the model and then simulate the changes induced by the minimum pension in aggregate retirement patterns. The impact is substantial: there is...

February 4, 2017
Articles, Labor Market,
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04Feb

Private pension funds in Poland

By Lech Keller-Krawczyk This article takes a highly critical look at the pension system in Poland, which had been reformed after 1989 on the basis of the World Bank's 'three pillars' model of a combined state and private, mandatory and voluntary pensions system, despite evidence that the model is flawed and unobjective, being hinged on the inducements of cheaper credits for those countries adopting it. The author relates both the old and new pension systems in Poland, and describes the...

February 4, 2017
Articles, Corporate Governance, Investing, Labor Market,
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04Feb

Analysing the Performance of the Pension Fund Industry with a Stochastic Frontier Model: A Case Study for Portugal

The enhanced role of occupational and personal pension plans in providing retirement income raises issues concerning efficiency and performance. This paper evaluates the performance of Portuguese pension fund management companies from 1994 to 2003, using a Cobb-Douglas stochastic cost frontier model to generate their efficiency scores. We conclude that the price of labour, the price of capital-management services and the price of capital-premises, as well as profits, the number of participants, the number of closed funds and the decision...

February 4, 2017
Articles, Corporate Governance, Investing
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04Feb

Retirement delay unified or differentiated: based on the interaction between pension deficit and labor market

By Zou Tieding & Ye Hang The pension deficit has been rapidly enlarging for more than a decade. If the retirement age is set at a low level, it might trigger a pensions crisis. Since the average life span of the Chinese has extended from 71 to 76 years old in last ten years, the feasibility of rising the retirement age has also been promoted. Methods: This paper aims to construct a mathematical model for choosing a proper policy about...

February 4, 2017
Aging, Articles, Labor Market, System Sustainability, ,
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