Customize Consent Preferences

We use cookies to help you navigate efficiently and perform certain functions. You will find detailed information about all cookies under each consent category below.

The cookies that are categorized as "Necessary" are stored on your browser as they are essential for enabling the basic functionalities of the site. ... 

Always Active

Necessary cookies are required to enable the basic features of this site, such as providing secure log-in or adjusting your consent preferences. These cookies do not store any personally identifiable data.

No cookies to display.

Functional cookies help perform certain functionalities like sharing the content of the website on social media platforms, collecting feedback, and other third-party features.

No cookies to display.

Analytical cookies are used to understand how visitors interact with the website. These cookies help provide information on metrics such as the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc.

No cookies to display.

Performance cookies are used to understand and analyze the key performance indexes of the website which helps in delivering a better user experience for the visitors.

No cookies to display.

Advertisement cookies are used to provide visitors with customized advertisements based on the pages you visited previously and to analyze the effectiveness of the ad campaigns.

No cookies to display.

March 2017

Financial Inclusion and Consumer Protection in Peru

As part of its Global Policy Initiative, CGAP partnered with the Superintendence of Banks, Insurance and AFPs of Peru in late 2008, with the purpose of enhancing the understanding of the issues and trends in consumer relations when financial services are delivered through branchless banking, particularly through agents, which are used in ever increasing scale in Peru. The product was this joint report. The Superintendence and CGAP coordinated closely on data and information gathering, as well as on writing this...

The Occupational and Personal Pension Schemes (General Levy) (Amendment) Regulations 2017

The general levy on occupational and personal pension schemes recovers the core funding provided by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) for 3 public bodies: The Pensions Regulator The Pensions Advisory Service The Pensions Ombudsman This consultation seeks views on the proposed rates of the levy for the financial year 2017/18 onwards. This consultation is primarily aimed at pension scheme trustees, managers and administrators. We also welcome comments from the wider public. (more…)

February 2017

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 --...

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,...

Couples' Retirement under Individual Pension Design: A Regression Discontinuity Study for France

By Elena G. F. Stancanelli (Paris School of Economics) Abstract:     Retirement policies are individually designed but the majority of people of retirement age live as couples. We estimate the effects of a French pension reform on spouses’ employment decisions. We use labor-force survey data, pooled over different years, on fifty thousand French couples and apply a regression discontinuity framework, also controlling for couple’s unobserved heterogeneity. We conclude that the reform immediately reduced both spouses’ retirement probability by about 2...

The Rules of an Occupational Retirement Fund and the Problem of Defaulting Employers: A Reconsideration of Orion Money Purchase Pension Fund (SA) v Pension Funds Adjudicator

By Thulani Nkosi (University of the Witwatersrand) Abstract:     This paper reflects on the ongoing challenges presented by certain employers who, whilst deducting occupational retirement fund contributions from their employees' salaries, fail to pay over those contributions to the relevant occupational retirement funds. These employers also often fail to register themselves or their employees as participating members of occupational retirement funds when they are supposed to. Such failures to register with the relevant occupational retirement funds and to pay over...

Pensions, Retirement, and the Disutility of Labor: Bunching in Brazil

By Benjamin Thompson (University of Michigan) Abstract:      Elderly workers in developing countries face certain frictions, such as credit constraints, in their retirement decisions that may not be as common among their counterparts in the developed world, and these concerns may lead workers to work more or less than their preferred number of years. In this study, I firstly use regression discontinuity methods to show that a large fraction of urban male heads of households in Brazil (roughly 45%)...

Resultados de la Encuesta Nacional ¿Qué piensan los Millennials mexicanos del ahorro para el retiro?

En el marco del 20 Aniversario del Sistema de Ahorro para el Retiro (SAR), la CONSAR presenta hoy los resultados de la Encuesta Nacional denominada “¿Qué piensan los Millennials mexicanos del ahorro para el retiro?”. Dicha encuesta tuvo como objetivo identificar el conocimiento y las actitudes de la población mexicana entre 20 y 30 años en materia de pensiones y retiro. La importancia del estudio radica en que esta población no había sido estudiada antes en nuestro país bajo la...

Savings Externalities in a Second-Best World

By Andrew T. Hayashi (University of Virginia) & Daniel Patrick Murphy (University of Virginia) Abstract:       The debate among legal scholars about individuals’ failure to save enough for retirement happens on a “micro” level. It focuses on the causes and consequences of undersaving from the perspective of individuals and analyzes how legal interventions, such as tax subsidies and nudges, can best address individual saving mistakes. This debate depends on certain assumptions about how the macroeconomy operates. When these assumptions...

Employee Saving and Investment Decisions in Defined Contribution Pension Plans: Survey Evidence from the UK

By Alistair Byrne This paper uses data from a survey of the members of a UK defined contribution pension plan to explore the attitudes and knowledge of employees faced with pension saving and investment decisions. The results are consistent with behavioural economics in that many employees show limited interest in their pension arrangements. Not all members have received advice about their pension, but those who have are more likely to have calculated their savings needs, to have higher levels of...