August 2021
06Aug

Death and Taxes: Why Longer Lives Cost Money

By Christopher Snowdon The British population is getting older. In 1948, life expectancy was 68. Thanks to healthier lifestyles and medical advances, it is now 81 and is expected to rise to 87 by the end of the next decade. The rapid growth of the elderly population will put a strain on healthcare, social care and welfare provision. The Office for Budget Responsibility predicts that health spending in the UK will rise from 6.2 per cent of GDP in 2019/20 to...

August 6, 2021
Aging, Articles, Pension design, ,
Read more...
06Aug

Thatcher: the Myth of Deregulation

By Philip Booth It is commonly believed that, during the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher presided over a substantial reduction in government regulation of financial services. Indeed, some have blamed this deregulation for the financial crash that took place nearly 30 years after 1979. ‘Big Bang’ in 1986 did remove the restrictive practices and largely private regulation that existed in securities markets. However, this involved the state unwinding systems of private regulation and was not, as such, a simple act of deregulation. Furthermore, not...

August 6, 2021
Articles, Regulation, , ,
Read more...
06Aug

Revisiting Retirement and Social Security Claiming Decisions

By Neha Bairoliya, Kathleen McKiernan Why do individuals retire and claim their Social Security benefits at the age they do? Understanding the key drivers of these decisions has been an important topic of research as it can help guide policy discussions on the impact of potential reforms to the Social Security program. We revisit this crucial question by exploring new sources of heterogeneity in these decisions as well as novel mechanisms governing these trade-offs. Using data from the Health and...

August 6, 2021
Articles, Pension design, ,
Read more...

July 2021
29Jul

The Informal Economy and Economic Growth of Russia

By Minhyeon Jeong The size of the Russian informal economy has attenuated since 2014. However, there are a host of workers involved in economic exercises in the informal sector, and a handful of industries seems to rely on the informal economy too-much intensively. This manuscript takes a brief look at several issues going around the concept of the informal economy, then overviews the Russian informal economy and foresees its growth implications. Source: SSRN 272 views

July 29, 2021
Articles, Labor Market, ,
Read more...
29Jul

Fair Pension Policies with Occupation-Specific Aging

By Volker Grossmann, Johannes Schünemann & Holger Strulik We discuss public pension systems in a multi-period overlapping generations model with gerontologically founded human aging and a special focus on occupation-specific morbidity and mortality. We examine how distinct replacement rates for white-collar and blue-collar workers and early retirement policies could be designed to provide a fair and aggregate welfare-enhancing public pension system. Calibrating the model to Germany, we find that a pension system that equalizes relative pension contributions and the relative...

July 29, 2021
Aging, Articles, Pension design, ,
Read more...
29Jul

Designing the Best Solution for Retirement

By Robert C. Merton In March 2020, Robert Powell, Retirement Management Journal editor-in-chief; Zvi Bodie, PhD, president of Bodie Associates and the Norman and Adele Barron Professor Emeritus of Management at Boston University; and Stacy Schaus, founder and chief executive officer of Schaus Group LLC, spoke with Merton about retirement solutions for the twenty-first century working and middle classes, fintech, and solving for the right problems. Source: SSRN 308 views

July 29, 2021
Articles, Pension design, ,
Read more...
23Jul

Joint Retirement of Couples: Evidence from Discontinuities in Denmark

By Esteban García-Miralles & Jonathan M. Leganza We study how social security influences the retirement behavior of couples. First, we exploit over two decades of full-population data and a discontinuity design to document sizable retirement spillovers to spouses when individuals reach pension eligibility age. Next, we explore underlying mechanisms. We find age differences within couples to be a fundamental determinant of joint retirement, which is driven by older spouses working longer. Accounting for these age differences reveals a strong gender...

July 23, 2021
Articles, Pension design, , ,
Read more...
23Jul

The Fintech Gender Gap

By Sharon Chen, Sebastian Doerr, Jon Frost, Leonardo Gambacorta & Hyun Song Shin Fintech promises to spur financial inclusion and close the gender gap in access to financial services. Using novel survey data for 28 countries, this paper finds a large 'fintech gender gap': while 29% of men use fintech products and services, only 21% of women do. The gap is present in almost every country in our sample. Country characteristics and several individual-level controls explain about a third of...

July 23, 2021
Articles, Innovation, Labor Market, Savings, , ,
Read more...
23Jul

Pensions and Timing of Retirement: The Case of the Public Service Pension Scheme in Uganda

By Kibs Boaz Muhanguzi Unsustainable defined-benefit public pension scheme, rising life expectancy, and high level of unemployment endanger the socioeconomic and political stability of Uganda’s economy. This research approaches the problem from labor supply point of view by: (i) analyzing the effect of the public service pension scheme on timing of retirement; (ii) investigating the required early retirement incentives that would increase employment in the public service; and (iii) determining the predictors of postretirement employment in the public service in...

July 23, 2021
Articles, Pension design, , , ,
Read more...
16Jul

Room to Thrive: Why Principles-based Standards Make Sense for Regulating Contingent Pension Plans

By Barry Gros As membership in traditional defined-benefit pension plans declines, plans in which benefits are contingent on the financial status of the plan are becoming more common. Rather than placing all the risk on sponsors to deliver guaranteed benefits to members, these contingent pension plans require members to take on at least some of the risk that benefits may or may not meet expectations. This E-Brief focuses on two types of contingent plans, target-benefit plans and multi- employer pension plans....

July 16, 2021
Articles, Regulation,
Read more...