Articles Archives - Page 56 of 140 - Pension Policy International

20MayMay 20, 2021

How Competitive Are Income Annuity Providers Over Time?

By David Blanchett, Michael S. Finke, Branislav Nikolic The 2019 SECURE Act provides safe harbor protections to employers who evaluate the costs of providing guaranteed income including gathering information on competing providers. Annuities can be more difficult to evaluate than mutual funds because annuity expenses can be opaque, financial strength matters, and insurer competitiveness can change over time. We find significant variation in the payout rates across providers over time. While the payout rankings of annuity companies (e.g., best to...

May 20, 2021

Articles, Pension design2021, Income, Payout, US

20MayMay 20, 2021

Social Security, Taxation Law, and Redistribution: Directions for Reform

By Alison McClelland, Richard Krever While it is now generally accepted that some redistribution of economic power is a legitimate goal of government, there is no consensus as to the type of redistribution that should be pursued. In the absence of a clear redistributive goal, it is impossible to evaluate critically current law, or make recommendations for change. In the first part of this article, we examine alternative models of redistribution and advocate a preferred model, namely, redistribution to promote...

May 20, 2021

Articles, Regulation, System SustainabilitySocial Security, Taxation

14MayMay 14, 2021

Can green fintechs solve the polluting pension problem?

Fintechs have seen green, launching apps that help us track the carbon emissions of our shopping habits, play the stock market in a planet-friendly way and even fight plastic pollution with our debit cards. These offerings are nudging consumers towards better behaviours, but there is one far bigger and far less sexy financial problem this crop of startups now wants to tackle. Pensions. A new survey from YouGov and Money Matter found that 44% of people would switch over to a...

May 14, 2021

Articles, News, Slider, Slider, System Sustainability2021, Climate crisis, ESG, Fintech

13MayMay 13, 2021

Have scale effects on cost margins of pension fund investment portfolios disappeared?

By Jacob Antoon Bikker, Jeroen Meringa Investment costs of pension funds are crucial for their returns. Consolidation in the pension fund market proceeds continuously, often with cost savings as the main argument. Unused economies of scale in the pension fund investment costs, however, have declined over the years to values close to zero, except for the very small pension funds. This paper investigates investment economies of scale in the Netherlands and pays special attention to the non-linear relationship between investment...

May 13, 2021

Articles, Operation, Pension design, System Sustainability2021, Investment, Political economy, US

13MayMay 13, 2021

Aging and Wages of Older Workers in Japan

By Quoc Hung Nguyen We first theoretically argue that labor force aging leads to a fall in the relative wage of older workers based on the Tinbergen's labor supply-demand framework. Using data from Japan's Basic Survey on Wage Structure and Population Census across 47 prefectures, we then estimate that a 10% increase in the relative number of workers aged 55 and older leads to a fall in their corresponding relative wage in a range of 3.5% to 4.3%. This equivalently...

May 13, 2021

Aging, Articles, Labor Market2021, Income, Japan, Retirement Age

13MayMay 13, 2021

Integrating Social Insurance and Social Assistance Programs for the Future World of Labor

By Robert J. Palacios, David A. Robalino Given the prevalence of informal labor, most countries have combined contributory social insurance programs (pensions, unemployment benefits, and health insurance), with non-contributory insurance programs and several types of "safety nets." All of these programs involve different types of subsidies and taxes, sometimes implicit. Because of design problems and the lack of coordination/integration between programs, these subsidies/taxes tend to cause four problems: 1) they can reduce incentives to contribute to mandatory insurance programs and...

May 13, 2021

Articles, Labor Market, Pension design2020, Informal Sector, Social Security

06MayMay 6, 2021

Does it Matter to be Informal? Type of employment and political opinions in the MENA region

By Anil Duman Informal activities are highly persistent in developing countries, and their economic effects are widely studied in the literature. Yet, political consequences of informality are relatively an understudied topic and big chunk of the existing work does not offer systematic examination of how informal sector participation shape preferences and attitudes. Our paper contributes to the literature by focusing on Arab countries that have very stable and large size of informal sectors in the world. Additionally, we take into...

May 6, 2021

Articles, Labor Market2021, Africa, Asia, Income, Informal Sector, MENA

06MayMay 6, 2021

A Game-Theoretic Analysis of Fiscal Policy Under Economic Growth From the Perspective of MMT

By Yasuhito Tanaka We present a game-theoretic analysis of fiscal policy under economic growth from the perspective of MMT using a simple two-periods overlapping generations (OLG) model with pay-as-you-go pensions. We show the following results. 1) Sustained budget deficit is necessary to maintain full-employment under economic growth driven by population growth or technological progress. 2) An excessive budget deficit triggers inflation, and after one period inflation full-employment is maintained by sustained budget deficit with constant price. 3) Insufficient government deficit...

May 6, 2021

Articles, System Sustainability2021, Public Pensions, Taxation

06MayMay 6, 2021

Time Horizon, Saving Motive and Stock Market Participation

By Yosef Bonaparte This paper shows that household’s saving motives influence key portfolio choice decision: stock market participation. We utilize a unique data set from the Survey of Consumer Finance (2019 and panel 2007-209), which report about 24 reasons for saving and group these intro 6 saving motive categories: durable, retirement, bequest, emergency, smooth and luxury. Our channel to identify how saving motives influence portfolio choice encompasses the time horizon, from the household’s view, about the planning time horizon to...

May 6, 2021

Articles, Investment, Savings2021, Pension design, Retirement Age

29AprApril 29, 2021

Is Bitcoin Prudent? Is Art Diversified?: Offering Alternative Investments to 401(k) Participants

By Edward A. Zelinsky Whether any category of alternative investments ought to be considered for the menus offered to 401(k) participants is a fact-intensive question. Central to this inquiry are ERISA’s legal tests of prudence, diversification and loyalty. These tests require such fact-driven inquiries as the acceptability of a particular category of investments to investors in general and to professional defined benefit trustees in particular and the trustee’s motivation for embracing such investments. Another important concern when making this inquiry...

April 29, 2021

Articles, Investing2021, Cryptocurrencies, Pension Management

May 2021

How Competitive Are Income Annuity Providers Over Time?

Can green fintechs solve the polluting pension problem?

Have scale effects on cost margins of pension fund investment portfolios disappeared?

Aging and Wages of Older Workers in Japan

Does it Matter to be Informal? Type of employment and political opinions in the MENA region

A Game-Theoretic Analysis of Fiscal Policy Under Economic Growth From the Perspective of MMT

Time Horizon, Saving Motive and Stock Market Participation

April 2021

Is Bitcoin Prudent? Is Art Diversified?: Offering Alternative Investments to 401(k) Participants