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September 2024

The Future of Retirement Security An International Comparison through the Lens of Adequacy, Sustainability, Equity and Plan Design

By Surya Kolluri, Catherine Reilly & David P. Richardson Countries around the world are considering and implementing reforms to their retirement systems for a variety of reasons, including increasing demographic and economic pressures. A key demographic driver is human longevity. For example, the average retiree can expect to spend about two decades in retirement, roughly double the time from 50 years ago. In the United States, life expectancy has risen by 17 years since the Social Security program debuted nearly...

Optimising Bangladesh’s Universal Pension Framework: From Lessons to Actions

By Samiha Chowdhury Social protection for the elderly, in the form of the Old-age Allowance (OAA) Programme, has been operational in Bangladesh since 1998, offering monthly financial support to senior citizens from poor and vulnerable households. As of FY24, the programme has approximately 5.8 million elderly people as beneficiaries, each receiving Tk.600 per month distributed on a quarterly basis. Apart from this, retirement benefits for the government employees and their families can also be considered a social protection programme for...

The Rise of Alternatives

By Juliane Begenau, Pauline Liang & Emil Siriwardane Since the 2000s, U.S. public pensions have shifted their risky investments towards alternative assets like private equity and hedge funds, some more aggressively than others. We explore several explanations for these cross-sectional trends, focusing on those implied by the mean-variance models used by most pensions. Our evidence suggests that the rise of alternatives has been fueled by an increase in their perceived risk-adjusted returns relative to public equities. Pension beliefs are shaped...

When the Abundance Ends: Economic Transformation, Population Aging, and Shrinking Lifecycle Surplus in China

By Feng Wang, Ke Shen & Yong Cai China’s age of abundance, driven by rapid increases in labor income and a favorable population age profile, led to a sizable surplus at the society level. Using the National Transfer Accounts (NTA) approach, this study updates results published in this journal a decade ago. It traces changes in labor income and consumption patterns in China in the 2010s, and compares them with those in the decade prior. Our results report significant shifts...

Beyond the Status Quo: A Critical Assessment of Lifecycle Investment Advice

By Aizhan Anarkulova, Scott Cederburg & Michael S. O'Doherty We challenge two central tenets of lifecycle investing: (i) investors should diversify across stocks and bonds and (ii) the young should hold more stocks than the old. An even mix of 50% domestic stocks and 50% international stocks held throughout one’s lifetime vastly outperforms age-based, stock-bond strategies in building wealth, supporting retirement consumption, preserving capital, and generating bequests. These findings are based on a lifecycle model that features dynamic processes for...

Pensioners Without Borders: Agglomeration and the Migration Response to Taxation

By Salla Kalin, Antoine Levy & Mathilde Munoz  This paper investigates whether and why pensioners move across borders in response to tax rate differentials. In 2013, retirees relocating to Portugal became eligible to a full tax exemption of foreign-source pensions. Contrary to the broadly held belief that seniors "age in place", we find substantial international mobility responses to the reform, concentrated among wealthy and educated pensioners in higher-tax origin countries. The implied migration elasticity of the stock of foreign pensioners...

Care-Dependent Target Benefit Pension Plan with Minimum Liability Gap

By Ruotian Ti, Ximin Rong, Cheng Tao & Hui Zhao With the progressive aging of populations, the significance of long-term care (LTC) services in aging societies is growing. In this paper, we integrate LTC services with pensions, studying a stochastic model for a care-dependent target benefit pension (TBP) plan. The plan members' target benefit rates are set according to the care cost for three different health states, i.e., healthy, mildly disabled and severely disabled states. And the pension contributions reflect...

Improving Pension Information: Experimental Evidence on Learning Using Online Resources

By Denise Laroze, Gabriela Fajardo, Charles Noussair, Ximena Quintanilla, Paulina Granados, Pedro Vallette & Mauricio López-Tapia Deciding what to do with one's pension funds is a high-stakes, one-shot decision. Retirement schemes are often described in technical jargon that few people understand. We consider whether the learning process can be eased by providing information in video format (vs. the standard textual format) and by changes to the user interface of the websites on which individuals learn about their pension options. The...

Sustainable Personal Finance : Planning for an Eco-Friendly Future

By Nur Wardina Azhar This study explores the emerging field of sustainable personal finance, focusing on strategies for planning an eco-friendly financial future. As environmental concerns become increasingly urgent, individuals are seeking ways to align their financial decisions with sustainability goals. This research examines the integration of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) criteria into various aspects of personal financial planning, including budgeting, investing, risk management, and retirement planning. The study analyzes contemporary issues such as green investing, eco-friendly insurance options,...

Financial Inclusion, Inequality, and Retirement Trends Among Older Workers

By Issac Marcelin & Wei Sun The study develops a financial inclusion index comprising three dimensions: usage, barriers, and access to financial resources. It employs a Principal Component Analysis to determine the weights of each dimension. This index helps assess the impact of financial inclusion on various factors like ethnic groups, minorities, human capital, retirement, wealth outcomes, and mental well-being. Our research reveals new psychological and sociological impacts of accessing financial products. Households with higher financial inclusion scores are likelier...