February 2024
02Feb

Gender Inequality Over the Life Cycle, Information Provision and Policy Preferences

By Alessandra Casarico, Jana Schuetz & Silke Uebelmesser We conduct a survey experiment with four thousand German respondents and provide information on two measures of gender inequality, separately or jointly: the gender gap in earnings and the gender gap in pensions. We analyze the effect of information provision on respondents’ views on the importance of reducing gender inequality and on their agreement with the adoption of policies targeted at different stages of the life cycle and aimed at reducing the...

February 2, 2024
Articles, Pension design, , , ,
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January 2024
26Jan

Asset Manager, Pension Fund & ESG

By René Maatman & Kleis Broekhuizen  When it comes to sustainability, much is expected of pension funds. Of course, they must ensure value-proof pensions. They are also expected to contribute to the environment, climate, human rights, social justice, and corporate governance. ESG must be factored into investment policy. But how and to what extent? There are varying preferences within the population of pension participants. Politicians, action groups and NGOs have their own beliefs. Pension fund boards must make complex trade-offs. How...

January 26, 2024
Articles, Pension Management, ,
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26Jan

Sustainable Finance and ESG: From Policy Concerns to Transformative Tools

By Peer C. Zumbansen  This article provides an in-depth summary of the inaugural Fall conference on ESG and Sustainable Finance at McGill University, November 2023. The conference was hosted by the SGI CIBC Office for Sustainable Finance (OSF) and the Business Law Platform at McGill’s Faculty of Law. OSF was established under the auspices of McGill’s Sustainable Growth Initiative, a cross-departmental research and collaboration platform committed to cutting-edge scholarship and training on sustainable finance, decarbonisation, green mobility, climate change and...

January 26, 2024
Articles, Pension Management, , ,
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26Jan

Collective Defined Contribution Pension with Stochastic Age-structured Models

By Fan Zhang We have reconfigured the Age-structured Model(ASM) model, leveraging its mathematical underpinnings rooted in cohort dynamics. This paper applies the novel ASM framework to the issue of Collective Defined Contribution Pension(CDC) pensions, providing a profound characterization of population dynamics and asset fluctuations at each time-age point within the pension context. This serves to substantiate the novel ASM framework as the key mathematical model for addressing CDC-related challenges. Furthermore, we have illustrated the distinct advantages of ASM through this...

January 26, 2024
Articles, Pension design,
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19Jan

Inter-Generational Spillovers in Labor Supply: Evidence from a Danish Retirement Reform

By Malene C. F. Laczek In this paper, I study how the labor supply of one generation affects the next. Utilizing longitudinal Danish register data and a large retirement reform, I document that parents’ retirement significantly affects the labor supply of their adult children. This inter-generational link is driven solely by mothers. Concretely, mothers’ retirement permanently increases their adult children’s income rank by 7 income rank points, driven by increased hours worked, participation in the labor force, improved occupational rank,...

January 19, 2024
Articles, Labor Market, , , ,
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19Jan

Social Security and Inequality in Belgium

By Giulia Klinges, Alain Jousten & Mathieu Lefebvre Over the years, the Belgian social security system has undergone substantial reform with a prime focus on increasing older worker labor force participation. The paper explores the effect of past reforms on inequality in old age. We distinguish two separate effects: The mechanical effect considers the change in inequality and expected benefit levels due to the reforms for a fixed retirement age distribution. The behavioral effect accounts for the endogenous change caused...

January 19, 2024
Articles, System Characterization, , , ,
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19Jan

Occupations Shape Retirement Across Countries

By Philip Sauré, Arthur Seibold, Elizaveta Smorodenkova & Hosny Zoabi We study how occupations shape individual and aggregate retirement behavior. First, we document large differences in individual retirement ages across occupations in U.S. data. We then show that retirement behavior among European workers is strongly correlated with U.S. occupational retirement ages, indicating an inherent association between occupations and retirement that is present across institutional settings. Finally, we find that occupational composition is an important determinant of aggregate retirement behavior across...

January 19, 2024
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12Jan

Between Individual Risk and State Responsibility: 20 Years of Swedish Premium Pensions

By Anika Seemann  In 2000, the Swedish pension reform of 1998 led to the introduction of a capital-funded pension component with individual investment accounts in the first pillar of the pension system, known as the premium pension. This article takes the 20th anniversary of the Swedish premium pension as an opportunity for a fundamental evaluation. It shows which guiding principles the premium pension system was founded on when it was introduced, which problems have arisen since its introduction, how the...

January 12, 2024
Articles, System Characterization, ,
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12Jan

Pension Systems (Un)Sustainability and Fiscal Constraints: A Comparative Analysis

By Michael Wickens  Using an overlapping generations model, two new indicators of public pension system sustainability are proposed: the pension space, which measures the capacity to pay for pension expenditures out of labour taxation, and the pension space exhaustion probability reflecting demographic uncertainties. These measures reveal that the pension spaces of advanced economies are strikingly different. Most nations have little scope to further finance pensions out of labour income  taxation over the next thirty years. There is no one-size-fits-all solution....

January 12, 2024
Articles, System Sustainability, , ,
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12Jan

The Fiscal Cost of Aging in Belgium: Pensions and Healthcare

By Jean-Jacques Hallaert Belgium faces a fiscal consolidation challenge at a time when the fiscal cost of aging—primarily related to pension and health outlays—is mounting. Pension spending will increase relatively fast unless a combination of measures related to pension generosity and retirement eligibility are put in place. Potential efficiency gains are large in the health sector and could absorb part of the fiscal and reorganization costs related to an aging population. Source SSRN

January 12, 2024
Aging, Articles, , ,
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