June 2022
09Jun

Factors Influencing the Choice of Pension Distribution at Retirement

By Robert L. Clark & Olivia S. Mitchell One of the most important financial decisions that pension participants make concerns how they access their pension assets when they terminate employment with their plan sponsor. Their choices depend both on own preferences and the options offered by their retirement plan. This paper examines both past and future pension withdrawal choices for those with defined benefit and defined contribution pensions, separately. Our data are drawn from a set of pension distribution questions...

June 9, 2022
Articles, Pension design, , , , ,
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03Jun

Gay, gray, black, and blue: An examination of some of the challenges faced by older LGBTQ people of color

By Seon Kum Few studies exist that highlight the life experiences of the older LGBTQ person of color. This cohort faces unique challenges in life that have not been explored or investigated extensively, if at all. Older LGBTQ people of color have experienced discrimination based on race, gender, and sexuality in all phases of their lives, often bearing witness to and helping to start various equal rights and social justice movements. In addition to the unique challenges that come with...

June 3, 2022
Articles, Labor Market, System Characterization, , , ,
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03Jun

Reporting on a Greener Future

By Maggie Williams As climate change and ESG stewardship become a central part of pension schemes’ investment strategy, identifying suitable performance measures and devising frameworks to report on them has also risen in importance. The Pensions Regulator and Department for Work and Pensions now requires schemes to use the Task Force on Climate-Related Disclosures framework (TCFD) to report on their portfolios – and from April 2022, large companies in the UK will also be subject to mandatory climate risk reporting, based...

June 3, 2022
Articles, Investment, Operation, Regulation, ,
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03Jun

Markets and Mandates: Retirement in Chile and the United States

By Manisha Padi Ordinary Americans are accustomed to a strict separation between private markets and public-benefits programs. Government programs, such as Social Security for retirees, disburse benefits to households without regard to the private options available to them. Conversely, private-market regulators, including the Securities and Exchange Commission, make rules about private retirement savings without accounting for public retirement benefits. The result is a disjointed experience for American retirees, whose public benefits are restricted by the Social Security Administration but whose...

June 3, 2022
Articles, Pension design, , , ,
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May 2022
26May

Does Financial Education in High School Affect Retirement Savings in Adulthood?

By Melody Harvey & Carly Urban Since individuals are increasingly required to manage their own retirement portfolios, policy levers that increase retirement planning and saving have become increasingly important. We use variation in timing and presence of state-required personal finance coursework in high schools to estimate the effect of the financial education coursework on the likelihood of holding and amount in retirement accounts in adulthood (ages 25–40). Our results show no definitive increases in account ownership, non-retirement investment accounts, or...

May 26, 2022
Articles, Savings, , ,
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Why are LGBTQ+ investors different?
26May

Why are LGBTQ+ investors different?

By Matthew Carter &  Paul Donovan The obvious question when writing about LGBTQ+ investment is why the LGBTQ+ community would need to invest differently from the cis-gendered heterosexual community? The answer is that full legal and social equality does not exist anywhere in the world. When different groups face different social or legal environments, they need to invest differently to deal with the challenges that they face. While the main concerns of investors are the same, regardless of gender or sexual...

May 26, 2022
Articles, Investing, , ,
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Serenity Now, Save Later? Evidence on Retirement Savings Puzzles from a 401(K) Field Experiment
26May

Serenity Now, Save Later? Evidence on Retirement Savings Puzzles from a 401(K) Field Experiment

By Saurabh Bhargava & Lynn Conell-Price Economists have advanced several psychological frictions to explain why many 401(k)-eligible employees undersave for retirement despite generous matching incentives. We provide evidence on four of these frictions through a field experiment randomizing undersaving employees to information- and incentive-based treatments linked to a survey assessing each friction’s baseline incidence. We describe four main findings: (1) We corroborate prior work showing pervasive deficits in retirement literacy and their correlation with saving but reject any meaningful increase...

May 26, 2022
Articles, Pension design, Savings, ,
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Progressing Towards Efficiency: The Role for Labor Tax Progression in Reforming Social Security
19May

Progressing Towards Efficiency: The Role for Labor Tax Progression in Reforming Social Security

By Krzysztof Makarski, Joanna Tyrowicz & Oliwia Komada We study interactions between progressive labor taxation and social security reform. Increasing longevity puts fiscal strain that necessitates the social security reform. The current social security is redistributive, thus providing (at least partial) insurance against idiosyncratic income shocks, but at the expense of labor supply distortions. A reform which links pensions to individual incomes reduces distortions associated with social security contributions, but incurs insurance loss. We show that the progressive labor tax...

May 19, 2022
Articles, Savings, System Characterization, , , ,
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Top-Income Adjustments and Official Statistics on Income Distribution: The Case of the UK
19May

Top-Income Adjustments and Official Statistics on Income Distribution: The Case of the UK

By Stephen P. Jenkins UK official statistics on income distribution have incorporated top-income adjustments to household survey data since 1992. This article reviews the work undertaken by the Department for Work and Pensions and the Office for National Statistics, and the academic research that influenced them, and reflects on the lessons to learn from the UK experience. Source: SSRN 228 views

May 19, 2022
Articles, Savings, System Characterization, , , ,
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People and Investor Attention to Climate Change
19May

People and Investor Attention to Climate Change

By Mauro Aliano, Franco Fiordelisi, Giuseppe Galloppo & Viktoriia Paimanova This paper empirically studies whether people and investors globally really see climate change as a major threat, as defined by United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Our identification strategy aims to investigate two research questions: (1) whether people attention to Climate Change varies depending on local natural disasters and (2) how does the climate change attention affect the stock price of local firms and, thus, the investors’ trading behavior....

May 19, 2022
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