Customize Consent Preferences

We use cookies to help you navigate efficiently and perform certain functions. You will find detailed information about all cookies under each consent category below.

The cookies that are categorized as "Necessary" are stored on your browser as they are essential for enabling the basic functionalities of the site. ... 

Always Active

Necessary cookies are required to enable the basic features of this site, such as providing secure log-in or adjusting your consent preferences. These cookies do not store any personally identifiable data.

No cookies to display.

Functional cookies help perform certain functionalities like sharing the content of the website on social media platforms, collecting feedback, and other third-party features.

No cookies to display.

Analytical cookies are used to understand how visitors interact with the website. These cookies help provide information on metrics such as the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc.

No cookies to display.

Performance cookies are used to understand and analyze the key performance indexes of the website which helps in delivering a better user experience for the visitors.

No cookies to display.

Advertisement cookies are used to provide visitors with customized advertisements based on the pages you visited previously and to analyze the effectiveness of the ad campaigns.

No cookies to display.

June 2022

Do Retirees Want to Consume More, Less or the Same as they Age?

By Anqi Chen & Alicia H. Munnell Whether households prefer a constant, increasing, or decreasing path of consumption in retirement has important implications for our understanding of retirement adequacy. Financial planners and researchers often assume that retirees would like to maintain a constant standard of living. Similarly, Social Security benefits are based on the premise that people want steady inflation-adjusted benefits. However, several studies suggest that retired households actually decrease their consumption over time. This brief, which reports the results of...

LGBTQ and Finance

By Sanjukta Brahma, Konstantinos Gavriilidis, Vasileios Kallinterakis, Thanos Verousis & Mengyu Zhang Recent changes in workplace and corporate board diversity policies and a series of court rulings have signalled a fundamental change in the treatment of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (henceforth LGBTQ) people in the corporate world. In this paper, we survey the burgeoning literature on the role of sexual orientation in finance. We show that LGBTQ-friendly policies affect organizational outcomes and enhance the quality of corporate governance....

Investment Choice in Collectivised Pensions

By John Armstrong & Cristin Buescu Investment choice is a central theme of UK pension policy. This paper shows how a collective pension fund can be managed in a manner that allows individuals to choose how their pension is invested and their schedule of pension payments. The potential benefit to investors of such a fund is quantified on the assumption that they choose to invest optimally. For our indicative choice of individual we find that they would need to invest...

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...

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...

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...

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...

May 2022

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...

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...

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...