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January 2025

Sustainable Investing

By Lubos Pastor, Robert F. Stambaugh & Lucian A. Taylor We review the literature on sustainable investing, focusing on financial effects. First, we examine the effects of investor tastes on portfolio tilts and asset prices in a simple equilibrium setting. We establish novel connections, including a direct relation between the green portfolio tilt and the greenium. We also relate our framework to prior modeling of divestment. Finally, we review evidence related to the main concepts from our theoretical analysis, including the greenium, green...

Retirees Relocate for Income Tax Exemptions

By Linda Gorman In 2013, the Portuguese government offered foreign retirees relocating to Portugal a 10-year tax exemption on their foreign-source pension income, provided their country of origin had a tax treaty with Portugal. As the number of immigrant retirees grew, the amount of forgone income taxes grew, reaching €1.5 billion, or about 0.6 percent of GDP, by 2021. In that year, the tax exemption was replaced by a 10 percent rate. In 2024, the exemption was repealed. Source National Bureau...

Collective Bargaining, Unions, and the Wage Structure: An International Perspective

By Simon Jäger, Suresh Naidu & Benjamin Schoefer In this paper, we assess the recent economics literature on collective bargaining. Despite a declining trend in the OECD in coverage and especially union membership, a large share of formal workers around the world are still covered by collective bargaining agreements. We describe the substantial institutional variation across a variety of countries, highlighting research done with modern research designs and recently available administrative datasets. We then estimate a canonical empirical model of individual-level coverage effects...

December 2024

Private Equity for Pension Plans? Evaluating Private Equity Performance from an Investor’s Perspective

By Arthur Korteweg, Stavros Panageas & Anand Systla We evaluate private equity (PE) performance using investor-specific stochastic discount factors, and examine whether investors could benefit from changing their allocation to PE. Plans invest in PE funds with higher average risk-adjusted performance. This is mainly due to access to successful PE managers, not superior selection skill. Decomposing returns into risk-compensation and "alpha", we find that some plans obtain higher PE returns by taking more risk without earning higher, and in some cases earning lower,...

Do Pensions Enhance Worker Effort and Selection? Evidence from Public Schools

By Michael Bates & Andrew C. Johnston Why do employers offer pensions? We empirically examine two theoretical rationales, namely that pensions improve worker effort and worker selection. We test these hypotheses using rich administrative measures on effort and output for teachers around the pension-eligibility notch. When workers cross the notch, their effective compensation falls by roughly 50 percent of salary, but we observe no reduction in worker effort or output. This implies that pension payments do not increase effort. As for selection, we find...

The Economics of Net Zero Banking

By Adair Morse & Parinitha R. Sastry Banks have voluntarily committed to align their lending portfolios with a net zero path toward a decarbonized economy. In this review, we explore the economic channels for why portfolio decarbonization might be consistent with lender profit maximization. We frame the question by positing that net zero lending may create differential value through the channels of risk and returns, where return topics span profit margins and lending book growth arguments. We then use the lens of...

Household Saving in Japan: The Past, Present, and Future

By Charles Yuji Horioka This paper explores the determinants of the level of, and trends over time in, Japan’s household saving rate, with emphasis on the impact of the age structure of the population, and makes projections about future trends therein. The paper finds that Japan’s household saving rate has not always been high either absolutely or relative to other countries and that it was only during the 1961-86 period that it exceeded 15%. Past and future trends in Japan’s...

Fintech, Visual Attention, and Financial Inclusion: A Field Experiment on Migrant Remittances

By Eduardo Nakasone, Máximo Torero & Angelino Viceisza Migrant remittances are significant but remain relatively costly to send. Policymakers have argued that fintech, specifically, comparison websites like kayak.com but for sending money, can boost financial inclusion and reduce remittance prices. Yet, little is known about how migrants with limited education and trust in digital methods interact with fintech. We conduct a field experiment on a comparison website and vary remittance-company attributes shown to migrants, specifically, the time for delivery and...

Retirement Incentives and Decisions across the Income Distribution: Evidence in Canada

By Kevin S. Milligan & Tammy Schirle We evaluate the retirement incentives embedded in Canada’s retirement income system with attention to where individuals are located in the income distribution. We find that larger social security benefits are available to individuals with lower earnings in their work history because of the benefit income tests, but those from the top of the income distribution tend to enjoy longer lives over which they may receive benefits. Overall, we see greater Social Security Wealth...

November 2024

Financial Inclusion and the Informal Sector

By Noha Emara, Freddy Cama & Mohamed Trabelsi This paper explores the relationship between the informal sector and financial inclusion for a sample of 186 countries across the period 2004-2018 and using various methods of estimations—ordinary least squares, instrumental variables, fixed effects, and general method of moments. The results show financial inclusion significantly reduces the size of the shadow economy with all indicators of access and usage of financial services. The result is also robust when considering the income level,...