December 2022

Turn the Ship: The Moral Imperative and Legal Authority to Protect Retirees with Defaulted Student Loans from Social Security Offset

Turn the Ship: The Moral Imperative and Legal Authority to Protect Retirees with Defaulted Student Loans from Social Security Offset

By: Johnson Tyler The U.S. Department of Education (ED) is not powerless when it comes to debt collection or defaulted borrowers. It both has the moral imperative and legal authority to stop seizing Social Security benefits from elderly (62+) borrowers in default. An underutilized law allows an agency to exempt an entire class of debtors from Treasury Offset, the debt collection process that leads to the reduction of Social Security payments. This paper explains the history of offset; why recent...

Inferring Occupation Arduousness from Poor Health Beyond the Age of 50

Inferring Occupation Arduousness from Poor Health Beyond the Age of 50

By: Vincent Vandenberghe In the absence of a direct description of occupation arduousness, this paper shows how it can be inferred from poor health beyond the age of 50. Using retrospective lifetime data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) including the respondents’ professional career described with ISCO 2-digit, this paper finds a statistically significant link between many occupations and the risk of poor health beyond the age of 50. Next, we quantify the relative contribution...

International Comparative Analysis of Worker Age Distribution in the Service Industry

International Comparative Analysis of Worker Age Distribution in the Service Industry

By: Donghee Lee The problem of youth unemployment has recently become one of the hottest issues in the South Korean economy. The unemployment rate of the youth, those aged 15 to 29, hit 9.0% in 2014, which is the highest on record since the Asian financial crisis in 1997. This raises concern because while the unemployment rate for all ages fell 0.2%p during 2010~2014, the youth unemployment rate rose 1.0%p in the same period. In addition, the Korean employment rate...

Declining US Natural Interest Rate: Quantifying and Qualifying the Role of Pensions

Declining US Natural Interest Rate: Quantifying and Qualifying the Role of Pensions

By: Jacopo Bonchi & Giacomo Caracciolo We develop a life-cycle model and calibrate it to the US economy to quantify and qualify the role of the public pension system for the past and future trend of the natural interest rate, the so-called r∗. Between 1970 and 2015, past pension reforms mitigated the secular decline in r∗, raising it by around 1%, mainly through the positive effect of a higher replacement rate. As regards the future, we simulate the demographic trends, expected...

Conversion from DB to DC: The EU Pension Custodian

Conversion from DB to DC: The EU Pension Custodian

By: Hans van Meerten Worldwide we see a move to DC schemes. Most – if not all countries – choose the operate DB next to DC. However, in The Netherlands, the legislator choose for so-called conversion: transforming 'old' DB- to 'new' DC. In 2011, the Dutch legislator introduced the so called 'Pension Custodian'. It could only be used for the Dutch 2nd pillar DC IORP, the PPI. This Pension Custodion should *not* be confused with the IORP II Custodian. However, with the implementation of...

Spending Trajectories after Age 65: Variation by Initial Wealth

Spending Trajectories after Age 65: Variation by Initial Wealth

By: M Hurd & Susann Rohwedder   There has been extensive research on the importance of saving for retirement and on tools to support the accumulation of retirement wealth. Much less attention has been paid to the decumulation phase, that is, the spending down of wealth following retirement. Understanding the decumulation phase requires information about the spending patterns of older households and how those patterns evolve with age. This study uses comprehensive longitudinal data on total household spending from a survey...

Platforms Disrupting Reputation: Precarity and Recognition Struggles In The Remote Gig Economy

By Alex Wood & Vili Lehdonvirta Digitalisation and the use of algorithms have raised concerns over the future of work, the gig economy being identified by some as particularly concerning. In this article, we draw on 70 interviews in addition to participant observations to highlight the role of gig economy platforms in producing a novel form of reputational insecurity. This insecurity is generated by platforms disrupting the traditional operation of industry reputation in freelance markets. We highlight three areas of transformation...

Intergenerational Solidarity

By Alan Gutterman Aging is a natural progression of the life cycle and society will always have persons of different ages who need to learn to live alongside one another. One of the most consistent themes in the debate regarding the realization of the human rights of older persons is the need to strengthen “intergenerational solidarity” between and among all levels of families, communities and nations in order to achieve social cohesion and a society for all ages and build...

Can Investors Save the Planet? – NZAMI and Fiduciary Duty

By Tom Gosling & Iain MacNeil Asset manager signatories of the Net Zero Asset Manager Initiative, part of the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero, have committed to investing in line with the Race to Zero goal of limiting global warming to 1.5oC with limited or no overshoot. Given that a recent report from United Nations Environment Programme says that there is “no credible pathway” in place to 1.5oC, we explore the implications for asset managers, as fiduciaries, of investing...

From Financial Development to Informality: A Causal Link

By Salvatore Capasso, Franziska Ohnsorge & Shu Yu Financial development reduces the cost of accessing external financing and thus incentivizes investment in higher-productivity projects that allow firms to expand to the scale needed to operate in the formal economy. It also encourages participants of the informal sector to join the formal sector to gain access to credit and financial services. This paper documents two findings. First, countries with less pervasive informality are associated with greater financial development. Second, the impact...