April 2021
01Apr

Understanding Social Insurance: Risk and Value Pluralism in the Early British Welfare State

By Rachel Friedman This article seeks to make two contributions to the understanding of social insurance, a central policy tool of the modern welfare state. Focusing on Britain, it locates an important strand of theoretical support for early social insurance programs in antecedent developments in mathematical probability and statistics. While by no means the only source of support for social insurance, it argues that these philosophical developments were among the preconditions for the emergence of welfare policies. In addition, understanding...

April 1, 2021
Articles, Pension design, System Sustainability, , , ,
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March 2021
25Mar

Public Pensions and Private Savings

By Esteban García-Miralles, Jonathan Leganza How does the provision of public pension benefits impact private savings? We answer this question in the context of a reform in Denmark that altered old-age benefit payouts through a discontinuous increase in pension eligibility ages contingent on birthdate. Using detailed administrative data and a regression discontinuity design, we identify the causal effects of the policy, leveraging our setting to study essentially the entire financial portfolio. We document responses over two distinct time horizons. First,...

March 25, 2021
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25Mar

Do public pensions matter to marriage? Evidence from China

By Hua Chen, Zining Liu, Xiaoxu Yang This article examines the role of public pensions on the marriage market based on China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS). Firstly, we investigate if the extensive margin of public pensions, i.e., whether to participate in public pensions or not, has a significant effect through Difference-in-Difference (DID). The results indicate that public pensions have a significant effect on marriage for both urban and rural residents, and the gender and income heterogeneity of the...

March 25, 2021
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25Mar

How Much Taxes Will Retirees Owe on Their Retirement Income?

By Anqi Chen, Alicia H. Munnell To evaluate their retirement resources, households approaching retirement will examine their Social Security statements, defined benefit pensions, defined contribution balances, and other financial assets. However, many households may forget that not all of these resources belong to them; they will need to pay some portion to federal and state government in taxes. It is unclear, however, just how large the tax burden is for the typical retired household and for households with different income...

March 25, 2021
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19Mar

The Welfare and Labor Market Effects of Mandatory Pension Savings: Evidence from the Israeli Case

By Adi Brender Many studies show that workers make poor decisions about pension savings. Policy responses to these failures include social security retirement arrangements, tax benefits for pension savings and, in some countries, also mandatory private savings towards retirement. This study examines the response of Israeli employees to the introduction of mandatory pension contributions, and the medium-term labor market effects of the arrangement, using a randomly selected panel of 300,000 employees. The first year of the arrangement, when enforcement was...

March 19, 2021
Adequacy, Articles, Labor Market, Savings, , ,
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19Mar

The PEPP Contribution to the Capital Markets Union (CMU)

By Jorik van Zanden, Hans van Meerten, Andrea Minto The EU has several ‘pension problems, for example ageing, poor portability and the lack of consumer protection. Furthermore, the EU internal market for pensions is not sufficiently developed. This not only prevents, for example, a cost-efficient pension build-up of an employee working abroad, but the differences among national rule also restrict a local pension participant in choosing a pension fund established abroad. All these problems have been recently pointed out in the...

March 19, 2021
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19Mar

Private Markets, Infrastructure and Venture Capital in the Post-COVID Era: The Pension Perspective

By David Weeks, M. Nicolas J. Firzli This second of a series of seven papers co-authored by M. Nicolas J. Firzli and David Weeks looks at the notions of private markets – PE, VC, private debt and infrastructure – and the "quest for yields" in a low interest rates environment, which where discussed at two recent global conferences organised by the G7 Pensions Summit (G7 P7) and the Singapore Economic Forum (SEF). ESG, impact investing, renewable energy and the notion of...

March 19, 2021
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11Mar

Gender Gap in Pension Income: Cross-Country Analysis and Role of Gender AttitudesBy

By Anna Veremchuk The aim of this paper is to study the gender pension gap in Europe based on the newest EU-SILC data from the 2018 wave. The contribution of the paper is twofold. First, it provides evidence on factors shaping the gender pension gap in a large number of EU countries. Second, it analyses the relationship between the pension gap and: (1) the coverage of occupational (second pillar) pensions and (2) gender attitudes. The main factor contributing to gender inequality in pension...

March 11, 2021
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11Mar

Pension Information and Women’s Awareness

By Marta Angelici, Daniela Del Boca, Noemi Oggero, Paola Profeta, Maria Christina Rossi, Claudia Villosio We explore the role of financial and pension information in increasing women’s knowledge and awareness of their future pension status, and consequently, in reducing the gender pension gap. A representative sample of 1249 Italian working women were interviewed to assess their knowledge about pensions and financial issues and about their own savings and personal wealth planned for retirement. The responses showed that their knowledge and...

March 11, 2021
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11Mar

Shoring Up Shortfalls: Women, Retirement and the Growing Gigsupp Economy

By Caroline Bruckner, Jonathan Barry Forman In recent years, high-profile Silicon Valley firms have engineered billion-dollar IPOs through developing online and app-based platforms that connect service providers and sellers with customers and process their payments (the “online platform economy”). Today, millions of Americans earn income using platforms developed by Uber, Etsy, and Airbnb; and research has identified the limitations of existing federal tax rules to facilitate tax compliance of these workers and considered the consequences of their failure to pay...

March 11, 2021
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