March 2023

Does Common Ownership Affect Employee Welfare? Evidence from Corporate Pension Funding

By Charles Hsu, Zhiming Ma & Kaitang Zhou This study examines the effect of common institutional ownership on corporate pension funding. We posit that a common owner’s incentive to maximize shareholder value may come at the cost of employee welfare. Consistent with this prediction, we find robust evidence that firms with common ownership demonstrate greater pension underfunding than firms without common ownership. This effect increases with firms’ value-added activities, common owners’ shareholding, duration of ownership, and portfolio size. It decreases...

ESG and Climate Change: Pension Fund Dos and Don’ts

By Randy Bauslaugh Pension fund administrators have a fiduciary duty to prudently manage financial risks and opportunities when investing plan assets and when managing plan operations that are paid from the pension fund. This includes the financial risks and opportunities associated with climate change and other environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues. But what are the legal dos and don’ts? Plan fiduciaries will always be on solid legal ground if they take ESG information into account for financial purposes – to...

Frames, Incentives, and Education: Effectiveness of Interventions to Delay Public Pension Claiming

By Franca Glenzer, Pierre-Carl Michaud & Stefan Staubli Many people forgo a higher stream of public pension income by claiming early. We provide both quasi-experimental and survey-experimental evidence that the timing of public pension claiming is relatively inelastic to changes in financial incentives in Canada. Using the survey experiment, we evaluate the effect of two different educational interventions and different ways of framing the incentive to delay claiming. While all three types of interventions induce delays, these interventions have heterogeneous...

Pension Administration in Nigeria: Lessons and Reflections

By Opeyemi Naimot Dawodu In every democratic society, from the jurisprudential perspective, there are certain ideals that must be present one of which is social justice. These ideals are aspirations and the nearer a society is to these aspirations, the better the society is. In a country like Nigeria, pension is one of the social objectives in partial fulfillment of the ideals present in Chapter 2 of the 1999 Constitution of Nigeria (as amended 2011) and as such how this...

COVID-19 Private Pension Withdrawals and Unemployment Tenures

By Tristram Sainsbury, Robert V. Breunig & Timothy Watson This is the first study to evaluate the effects of early pension withdrawal policies on tenures on unemployment payments in the COVID-19 context. We use a novel set of linked whole-of-population administrative records to examine more than half-a-million Australians who found themselves newly on an unemployment payment in the initial months of the COVID-19 pandemic. We estimate that receiving a lump sum of up to A$10,000 from superannuation accounts at the...

Pensions and the Nordic Welfare Model

By Torben M. Andersen Within the frame of the Nordic welfare model, pension system design has taken very different routes. While the overall aims in terms of distribution and replacement rates are similar, the division of labour between defined benefit and contribution as well as pay-as-you-go versus funded schemes differs significantly. The main characteristics of the pension systems in the Nordic countries are presented, and outcomes relating to pension adequacy in terms of poverty and replacement rates are discussed. Specific...

Longevity, Health and Housing Risks Management in Retirement

By Pierre-Carl Michaud & Pascal St-Amour Annuities, long-term care insurance and reverse mortgages remain unpopular to manage longevity, medical and housing price risks after retirement. We analyze low demand using a life-cycle model structurally estimated with a unique stated-preference survey experiment of Canadian households. Low risk aversion, substitution between housing and consumption and low marginal utility when in poor health explain most of the reduced demand. Bequests motives are found to be a luxury good and play a limited role....

The Importance of Goals-based (and Values-based) Liability Indices: Applied to Impact and Green Investing

By Arun Muralidhar, Roland van den Brink, Patrick Groenendijk & Ronald van der Wouden Investors are creating portfolios that align with their specific goals and values. We posit that goals and values should be translated into Goals-based Liability Indices (“GLIdes”). GLIdes can be used to achieve goals, benchmark the asset portfolio, and improve governance.They allow Boards to measure progress to their overall (or multiple) goal(s) and also the relative risks of their investment policies and implementation. We first introduce the...

The Health-Consumption Effects of Increasing Retirement Age Late in the Game

By Eve Caroli, Catherine Pollak & Muriel Roger Using the differentiated increase in retirement age across cohorts introduced by the 2010 French pension reform, we estimate the health-consumption effects of a 4-month increase in retirement age. We focus on individuals who were close to retirement age but not retired yet by the time the reform was passed. Using administrative data on individual sick-leave claims and non-hospital health-care expenses, we show that the probability of having at least one sickness absence...

The Influence of Financial Literacy on Retirement Planning in South Africa

By Nyasha Tapiwa Dhlembeu, Mamekwa Katlego Kekana & Mpinda Freddy Mvita Background: A shift in the retirement planning and pensions landscape has created an enormous responsibility for individuals to plan for their retirement provision actively. Very few South Africans reach the average retirement age of 65 years with sufficient funds to sustain themselves during their retirement. Purpose/objective: Using secondary data from the 2011 South African Social Attitudes Survey (SASAS), this study aims to examine the influence financial literacy has on the...