July 2024
31Jul

When Institutions Interact: How the Effects of Unemployment Insurance are Shaped by Retirement Policies

By Matthew Gudgeon, Pablo Guzman, Johannes F. Schmieder, Simon Trenkle & Han Ye This paper shows empirically that the non-employment effects of unemployment insurance (UI) for older workers depend in a first-order way on the structure of retirement policies. Using German data, we first present reduced-form evidence of these interactions, documenting large bunching in UI inflows at the age that allows workers to claim their pension following UI expiration. We then estimate a dynamic life-cycle model and use it to...

July 31, 2024
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31Jul

Pension Systems (Un) Sustainability and Fiscal Constraints: A Comparative Analysis

By Michael Wickens, Vito Polito & Burkhard Heer Using an overlapping generations model, two new indicators of public pension system sustainability are proposed: the pension space, which measures the capacity to pay for pension expenditures out of labour taxation, and the pension space exhaustion probability reflecting demographic uncertainties. These measures reveal that the pension spaces of advanced economies are strikingly different. Most nations have little scope to further finance pensions out of labour income  taxation over the next thirty years....

July 31, 2024
Articles, System Sustainability, , , ,
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31Jul

Unemployment in Informal Labor Markets in Developing Countries

By Emily Breza & Supreet Kaur Developing countries typically exhibit low rates of rural wage employment. For example, in India, male workers whose primary source of earnings is wage labor report working on only 46 percent of days per year.1 Bangladesh has a similarly low 55 percent rate of employment among landless males, and the rates are even lower in sub-Saharan Africa. What do these low employment rates mean? One possibility is that they reflect extremely high involuntary unemployment. Alternatively, the rates...

July 31, 2024
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19Jul

The Impacts of Raising the Public Pension Eligibility Age on the Lifestyles of Elderly People: Evidence from Japan

By Shinya Inukai With many countries facing rapid population aging, the sustainability of public pensions has become a pressing issue. I evaluate the impacts, including both employment and time allocation, of public pension reform on the lifestyles of the elderly. In Japan, all residents aged 20 or older are covered by the public pension, with eligibility determined mechanically based on age. I focus on the reform raising men's eligibility age from 60 to 61 in 2001 and estimate its impact...

July 19, 2024
Aging, Articles, , , ,
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19Jul

Dirty Air and Green Investments: The Impact of Pollution Information on Portfolio Allocations

By Raymond Fisman, Pulak Ghosh, Arkodipta Sarkar & Jian Zhang We study exposure to pollution information and investment portfolio allocations, exploiting the rollout of air quality monitoring stations in India. Using a triple-differences framework, we show that retail investors' investments in "brown" stocks are negatively related to local air pollution after a monitoring station appears nearby, with particularly pronounced effects on ``alert'' dates when air quality is listed as harmful to the general population. The effect of pollution information on...

July 19, 2024
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19Jul

Pension Reforms, Expectations, and Labour Market Behaviour

By Tabea Bucher-Koenen, Irene Ferrari & Yuri Pettinicchi This study examines how expectations about institutional settings and their reform affect middleaged individuals’ labour market behaviour in the context of these reforms. We exploit time and cross-country variation in pension regulations in six European countries. We show that, following a 1-year increase in the pension eligibility age (SEA), individuals expect to claim their pensions around 3.6 months later on average - adjustments are larger among women compared to men. Individuals with...

July 19, 2024
Articles, Pension design, , ,
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12Jul

Retirement Decisions in the Age of Covid-19 are Older Employees in Digital Occupations Working Longer?

By Giovanni Gallo & Amparo Nagore This paper investigates the retirement response to the pandemic and to the resulting acceleration in the adoption of new technologies. Using the European Union Statistics of Income and Living Conditions datasets and making use of the natural experiment of many workers being forced to work from home in Europe during the lockdown, we compare the retirement response of older workers in digital occupations (i.e. more exposed to digital technology) versus non-digital occupations to detect...

July 12, 2024
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12Jul

Career Expectations and Outcomes: Evidence (on Gender Gaps) from the Economics Job Market

By Brooke Helppie McFall, Eric D. Parolin & Basit Zafar This paper investigates gender gaps in long-term career expectations and outcomes of PhD candidates in economics. For this purpose, we match rich survey data on PhD candidates (from the 2008-2010 job market cohorts) to public data on job histories and publication records through 2022. We document four novel empirical facts: (1) there is a robust gender gap in career expectations, with females about 10 percentage points less likely to ex-ante expect to get...

July 12, 2024
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12Jul

The Impacts of Raising the Public Pension Eligibility Age on the Lifestyles of Elderly People: Evidence from Japan

By Shinya Inukai With many countries facing rapid population aging, the sustainability of public pensions has become a pressing issue. I evaluate the impacts, including both employment and time allocation, of public pension reform on the lifestyles of the elderly. In Japan, all residents aged 20 or older are covered by the public pension, with eligibility determined mechanically based on age. I focus on the reform raising men's eligibility age from 60 to 61 in 2001 and estimate its impact...

July 12, 2024
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05Jul

Retirement Benefit Distributions for California Educators

By Robert L. Clark, Denis Pelletier & Beth Ritter Distribution choices by individuals retiring from CalSTRS are examined for participants that retired between 2016 and 2023. Women are much more likely to select a member-only annuity while a larger proportion of men select a J&S annuity that provide survivor benefits. Being married is a dominant factor in the selection of J&S annuities. Greater final annual salary, older ages at retirement, and more years of service are associated with a greater probability of choosing...

July 5, 2024
Articles, System Characterization, , ,
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