April 2020
17Apr

Income and Wealth Shocks and Expectations during the COVID-19 Pandemic

By Tobin Hanspal, Annika Weber, Johannes Wohlfart In early April 2020 we conducted a survey on a representative sample of more than 8,000 US households to study the effect of the coronavirus crisis on household income and retirement wealth, households' expectations about the recovery, and the impact of the shock on individuals' economic choices. Wealth shocks are large across the population, but more pronounced for middle-age households and those higher in the wealth and income distributions. This contrasts with...

April 17, 2020
Articles, Labor Market, System Sustainability, , , ,
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11Apr

Enlisting Employees In Improving Payroll-Tax Compliance: Evidence From Mexico

By Todd Kumler, Eric Verhoogen, Judith A. Frías A growing body of research suggests that difficulties in collecting taxes are an important constraint on economic performance in developing countries. Evidence from rich countries points to third- party reporting — in particular, employer reports of employees' wages — as a potential remedy. To what extent does the accuracy of third-party reporting carry over to developing countries, with their weaker enforcement regimes? In this paper, we compare two sources of wage information...

April 11, 2020
Articles, Labor Market, Operation, , ,
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March 2020
28Mar

Opting Out of Social Security: An Idea That’s Already Arrived

By David P. Richardson Under current law, workers can partially opt out of Social Security and reduce Medicare tax liability by accepting compensation in forms exempt from payroll taxes. Changing forms of compensation has an ambiguous effect on a worker's lifetime consumption possibilities. With respect to Medicare, all households are better off since they reduce tax contributions to a fixed benefit. For Social Security, the effect is ambiguous since the tax reduction implies future benefit reductions. Analyzing a hybrid...

March 28, 2020
Articles, Labor Market, ,
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13Mar

Society at a Glance 2019

By OECD The OECD biennial report providing internationally comparable data on demography and family characteristics, employment and wealth, mobility and housing, health status, social expenditure, subjective well-being, social cohesion, and other social measures. Included are such interesting variables as suicides, child care costs, prisoners, gender wage gaps, poverty and mothers in employment. Get the book here

March 13, 2020
Aging, Books, Labor Market,
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07Mar

Employee Representation and the Risk of Corporate Pension Plans

By Nicola Heusel We analyze the effect of direct labour representation in supervisory boards on the risk of corporate pension plans.We exploit employee representation requirements mandated by German labour law and find that firms with parity employee representation reduce pension plan risk both in terms of funding as well as in terms of investment risk. Source: SSRN

March 7, 2020
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February 2020
28Feb

Dynamic Incentives in Retirement Earnings-Replacement Benefits

By Andrés Dean, Sebastian Fleitas, KU Leuven, Mariana Zerpa Many defined-benefit pension systems in developed and developing countries use a small set of final years of earnings to compute pension benefits. This provides dynamic incentives to report higher earnings in the final years of the career. In this paper, we document the responses of self-employed and employed workers to these incentives, using social security administrative records and household surveys from Uruguay. We implement event studies that leverage the...

February 28, 2020
Articles, Labor Market, Pension design, , ,
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22Feb

Progress and Challenges of Nonfinancial Defined Contribution Pension Schemes

The aim of this anthology is to provide new contributions to the collective knowledge of the issues and challenges of designing mandated and earnings-related universal public pension schemes (UPPS), in which a universal public nonfinancial defined contribution (NDC) scheme is one of four design options. In 1994, Nonfinancial Defined Contribution (NDC) Pension Schemes left the crib and was taking its first steps in Sweden, Italy, and Latvia. A couple of years later a fourth sibling was born in Poland, with...

February 22, 2020
Books, Books, Labor Market, Pension design, , , , ,
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22Feb

Health, Wealth, and Informality over the Life Cycle

By Julien Albertini, Xavier Fairise, Anthony Terriau How do labor market and health outcomes interact over the life cycle in a country characterized by a large informal sector and strong inequalities? To quantify the effects of bad health on labor market trajectories, wealth, and consumption, we develop a life-cycle heterogeneous agents model with a formal and an informal sector. We estimate our model using data from the National Income Dynamics Study, the first nationally representative panel study in South Africa. We...

February 22, 2020
Articles, Labor Market, Pension design, , , ,
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15Feb

Retirement Migration from the U.S. to Latin American Colonial Cities (International Perspectives on Aging Book 27)

By Philip D. Sloane, Sheryl Zimmerman, Johanna Silbersack This book provides a comprehensive overview of a growing phenomenon in migration: retired Americans moving to Latin America. Through in-depth profiles of two of the most popular destinations – Cuenca, Ecuador and San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, the book provides a unique commentary on the social forces shaping this new diaspora and its impact on the settings to which retirees relocate.  Sections of the book address the lives and activities of retirees themselves; their...

February 15, 2020
Adequacy, Aging, Books, Books, Labor Market,
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01Feb

Measuring the ethnicity pensions gap

By The people´s pension Last year The People’s Pension examined in detail the drivers of the yawning gap in pension income between women and men, as the first part of a series examining the UK’s ‘under-pensioned’. Our second report focuses on another dramatically underpensioned group: ethnic minorities. New calculations by The People’s Pension reveal that the UK’s overall ethnicity pension gap – the percentage difference in pension income for pensioners who belong to an ethnic minority group compared to pensioners...

February 1, 2020
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