September 2022
09Sep

Are Retirement Planning Tools Substitutes or Complements to Financial Capability?

By Gopi Shah Goda, Matthew Levy, Colleen Flaherty Manchester, Aaron Sojourner, Joshua Tasoff, Jiusi Xiao We conducted a randomized controlled trial to understand how a web-based retirement saving calculator affects workers’ retirement-savings decisions. In both conditions, the calculator projected workers’ retirement income goal. In the treatment condition, it additionally projected retirement income based on defined-contribution savings, prominently displayed the gap between projected goal and actual retirement income, and allowed users to interactively explore how alternative, future contribution choices would affect...

September 9, 2022
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09Sep

The Impact of Health on Wealth: Empirical Evidence

By Umesh Ghimire This paper empirically evaluates the impact of health on wealth among adults between the ages of 50 and 100 in the United States. Using the frailty index to measure health status and carefully accounting for the dynamic relationship between frailty and wealth, I find that suffering one more health deficit leads, on average, to approximately 2.23 percent decline in the net worth of American households. The impact is concentrated among individuals over the age of 70, in...

September 9, 2022
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09Sep

Spending Elasticity and Optimal Portfolio Risk Levels

By David Blanchett, Jeremy Stempien Research on optimal retirement strategies overwhelmingly assumes that the retirement income goal is effectively inelastic (or fixed), which implies the retiree household has neither the desire nor the ability to cut back on spending for the entire duration of retirement (which is often assumed to last 30+ years). This is an incredibly unrealistic assumption that has significant implications on a myriad of retirement decisions. This piece focuses on how spending elasticity impacts optimal portfolio risk...

September 9, 2022
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02Sep

A Behaviorally Informed Financial Education Program for the Financially Vulnerable: Design and Effectiveness

By Ernst-Jan de Bruijn, Gerrit Antonides, Tamara Madern Financially vulnerable consumers are often associated with suboptimal financial behaviors. Evaluated financial education programs so far show difficulties to effectively reach this target population. In our attempt to solve this problem, we built a behaviorally informed financial education program incorporating insights from both motivational and behavioral change theories. In a quasi-experimental field study among Dutch financially vulnerable people, we compared this program with both a control group and a traditional program group....

September 2, 2022
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02Sep

Homeownership and the Perception of Material Security in Old Age

By Claudius Garten, Michal Myck, Monika Oczkowska Homeownership has been shown to be related to various aspects of well-being, although both the causal nature of this relationship and the possible channels behind it have been difficult to identify. We focus on one of the most often quoted mechanisms which could be responsible for the positive effects of homeownership, namely its role in providing material security in old age. Using data from 15 European countries collected in wave 2 of the...

September 2, 2022
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02Sep

How Gloomy is the Retirement Outlook for Millennials?

By Karen Smith, Richard W. Johnson Social, economic, demographic, and public policy shifts have made Millennial retirement security a pressing concern. Many recent trends threaten financial security for future generations of retirees. Male labor force participation pre-age 55 has slumped, men’s median earnings have stagnated, marriage and homeownership rates are falling, debt levels remain high, and out-of-pocket spending on medical and long-term services and supports are rising. Other trends are more encouraging, such as women’s higher earnings, the rise in...

September 2, 2022
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August 2022
26Aug

ESG and Private Market Assets: UK, EU, and Australian Investors Shifting the Trillions (2022 – 2026)

By M. Nicolas J. Firzli, Nick Sherry & Guan Seng Khoo The co-authors of the article, are amongst the original coiners of term such as “infrastructure as an asset class” and “pension superpowers.” They also predicted, at the onset of the Covid Crisis, that a “historic realignment on the asset allocation front is happening precisely at the moment when ESG is moving centre stage: even in once staunchly neoliberal jurisdictions like Texas, Alaska or Switzerland, the smart money is betting on...

August 26, 2022
Articles, Investing, Pension Management, ,
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26Aug

State and Local Government Employees Without Social Security Coverage: What Percentage Will Earn Pension Benefits that Fall Short of Social Security Equivalence?

By Jean-Pierre Aubry, Siyan Liu, Alicia H. Munnell, Laura Quinby & Glenn Springstead Social Security is designed to provide a base of retirement income, to be supplemented in part by employer-sponsored retirement plans. However, approximately one-quarter of state and local government employees are not covered by Social Security, which federal law allows if their employer-provided plans provide comparable benefits. Yet many public pensions are less generous for recent hires, raising questions of whether those plans will still provide Social Security–equivalent benefits....

August 26, 2022
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26Aug

Recessions and Retirement: New Evidence from the COVID-19 Pandemic

By Courtney Coile & Haiyi Zhang The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the US labor market, leading to an unprecedented loss of 22 million jobs in March and April 2020. Evidence from past recessions indicates that economic downturns are typically associated with an increase in retirements. In this study, we revisit the relationship between recessions and retirement in the COVID-19 era, using data from the Current Population Survey (CPS) supplemented by other data on economic and COVID conditions. We find that higher...

August 26, 2022
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19Aug

A Game-Theoretic Model of the Consumer Behavior under Pay-What-You-Want Pricing Strategy

By Vahid Ashrafimoghari & Jordan W. Suchow In a digital age where companies face rapid changes in technology, consumer trends, and business environments, there is a critical need for continual revision of the business model in response to disruptive innovation. A pillar of innovation in business practices is the adoption of novel pricing schemes, such as Pay-What-You-Want (PWYW). In this paper, we employed game theory and behavioral economics to model consumers’ behavior in response to a PWYW pricing strategy where...

August 19, 2022
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