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January 2024

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...

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....

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

December 2023

Subjective survival beliefs and social networks

By Seung Jeonga, Iqbal Owadallya, Steven Habermana & Douglas Wright People's perceptions about their chances of survival are known to deviate from the objective survival probabilites derived statistically from mortality data. This is crucial because it may explain why people save too little, why their retirement plans are inadequate, and why they do not buy financial security products such as life insurance and annuities which could protect them and their family in the event of early death or in old...

Innovative Combo Product Design Embedding Variable Annuity and Long-Term Care Insurance Contracts

By Yang Shen, Michael Sherris, Yawei Wang & Jonathan Ziveyi This paper presents a novel combo insurance product design consisting of a variable annuity contract embedded with guaranteed minimum income benefits and long-term care insurance. This combo product provides enhanced benefits when the policyholder is functionally disabled. The Hamiltonian Monte Carlo simulation technique is utilised for numerically valuing the combo product whose underlying fund is proportionally invested in multiple asset classes. Product features including the elimination period and the maximum...

Scale Economies, Bargaining Power, and Investment Performance: Evidence from Pension Plans

By Tjeerd de Vries, S. Yanki Kalfa, Allan Timmermann & Russ Wermers We explore the relation between the size of a defined benefit pension plan and its choice of active vs. passive management, internal vs. external management, and public vs. private markets. We find positive scale economies in pension plan investments; large plans have stronger bargaining power over their external managers in negotiating fees as well as having access to higher (pre-fee)-performing funds, relative to small plans. Using matching estimators,...

The Shift that Redefined Retirement Security

By Shashwat Vidhu Sher Retirement plans have been a standard feature of public and private sector employers in the United States since the early 1900s. Although Defined Benefit plans were the mainstay of most pensions plans for much of the twentieth century, there was a massive shift in the 1980s, mainly in the private sector, towards Defined Contribution plans like 401(k). The paper argues that government policies for the private sector, new employer-employee relationship, job-switching, and familiarity with the financial...

The Employment Landscape of Older Migrant Workers in China’s Aging Society: The Role of City-Level and Industry Specialization

By Haobin Fan & Ting Zhang As China’s population ages, more older workers are participating in the labor market, including a significant number of older migrant workers moving to urban areas. However, surprisingly little research has been done on their destination city and employment patterns. This paper addresses this gap by investigating the impact of city-level and industry specialization on the employment prospects of older migrant workers. Using both individual- and city-level data, we find that unlike prime-age migrant workers, older migrant workers have higher...

Playing the Long Game: How Longevity Affects Financial Planning and Family Caregiving

By Surya Kolluri, Janet Weiner & Mary Naylor Since 1935, when Social Security set the age to receive full benefits at 65, average life expectancy in the United States has risen by 17 years. This increased longevity has clear implications for financial planning, both in terms of the timing of retirement and the need to plan for a longer period of retirement. But there are less obvious implications as well, in terms of the likelihood and length of time that...

Recent developments in social pensions in Latin America

By International Social Security Association Non-contributory pensions, also known as social pensions, are an important component of rights-based universal social protection systems. They allow extending pension coverage relatively rapidly to elderly persons who are not covered by contributory schemes. Usually financed by general revenues and providing relatively modest benefits, eligibility for social pensions is often conditional on low income or certain other criteria. The right to social protection, including old age income security, is enshrined in various national constitutions and legal...