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June 2018

Optimal Risk-Sharing in Pension Funds When Stock and Labor Markets are Co-Integrated

By Ilja Boelaars (University of Chicago) & Roel Mehlkopf (Tilburg University) A well established believe in the pension industry is that collective pension funds should take more stock market risk (compared to individual retirement accounts) since risk may be shared with future generations. We extend the OLG model of Gollier (2008) by adding labor income risk in the spirit of Benzoni, Collin-Dufresne, and Goldstein (2007) and show that this idea may be misguided. For the empirical range of parameter values...

Inheritances and Inequality across and within Generations

By Andrew Hood & Robert Joyce Today’s elderly have much more wealth to bequeath than their predecessors, primarily as the result of rising homeownership rates and rising house prices. At the same time, today’s young adults will find it harder to accumulate wealth of their own than previous generations did, due to the sharp fall in homeownership, the dramatic decline of defined benefit pensions in the private sector and the stagnation in household incomes. Together, these trends mean inherited wealth is...

Why Are People Working Longer In The Netherlands?

By Adriaan Kalwij, Arie Kapteyn, Klaas de Vos Labor force participation at older ages has been rising in the Netherlands since the mid-nineteen-nineties. Reforms of the social security and pension systems have often been put forward as main explanations for this rise. However, participation rates above the normal retirement age of 65 have almost tripled for men and quadrupled for women despite the fact that at those ages reforms are unlikely to have had much impact. This suggests other factors...

Maybe the Gig Economy Isn’t Reshaping Work After All

By Ben Casselman You can see the gig economy everywhere but in the statistics. For years, economists, pundits and policymakers have grappled with the rise of Uber, the growth of temporary work and the fissuring of the relationship between companies and their workers. Optimists cheered the flexibility offered by the freelance life. Pessimists fretted about the disappearance of traditional jobs, with the benefits and legal protections they provided. That debate has played out largely in the absence of solid data. But on...

Flexible or Mandatory Retirement? Welfare Implications of Retirement Policies for a Population With Heterogeneous Health Conditions

By Zhenhua Feng (Tsinghua University - Institute of Economics), Jaimie W. Lien (The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) - Department of Decision Sciences & Managerial Economics) & Jie Zheng (Tsinghua University - School of Economics & Management) A flexible retirement policy has often been proposed as a solution to address the social dilemma of individuals in the population having different desired retirement ages. We analyze such a policy in an overlapping generations general equilibrium framework, where individuals differ in...

Age Discrimination in European Employment Law: Problems and Potential Reforms

By Dáire McCormack-George (School of Law at Trinity College, Dublin) Irish employment equality law is driven by European Union policy. However, the law on age discrimination in employment is currently in a deeply worrying state. In this essay, I will make two arguments in relation to the case law of the Court of Justice of the European Union on the lawfulness of mandatory retirement ages. First, I will argue that the case law of the Court is, in the main,...

May 2018

Long-Run Trends in the Economic Activity of Older People in the UK

By James W. Banks (Institute for Fiscal Studies; University of Manchester), Carl Emmerson (Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS)) & Gemma Tetlow (Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS)) We document employment rates of older men and women in the UK over the last forty years. In both cases growth in employment since the mid 1990s has been stronger than for younger age groups. On average, older men are still less likely to be in work than they were in the mid 1970s...

Universal Social Protection Floors: Costing Estimates and Affordability in 57 Lower Income Countries

By Isabel Ortiz (United Nations - International Labour Organization (ILO); Initiative for Policy Dialogue), Fabio Duran (International Labour Organization (ILO)), Karuna Pal (International Labour Organization (ILO)), Christina Behrendt (International Labour Office) & Andres Acuña-Ulate (International Labour Organization (ILO)) This paper presents the results of costing universal social protection floors in 34 lower middle-income, and 23 low-income countries, consisting of: (i) allowances for all children and all orphans; (ii) maternity benefits for all women with newborns; (iii) benefits for all persons...

The Aging Population and the Competitiveness of Cities: Benefits to the Urban Economy

By Peter Karl Kresl,‎ Daniele Ietri While much of the current literature on the economic consequences of an aging population focuses on the negative aspects, this enlightening book argues that seniors can bring significant benefits – such as vitality and competitiveness – to an urban economy.The authors illustrate the ways an aging population can have a positive impact on urban centers, including the move by large numbers of seniors from the suburbs to the city, where their disproportionate consumption of...

Social Security Programs and Retirement Around the World: Working Longer

By Courtney Coile (Wellesley College; National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)), Kevin S. Milligan (University of British Columbia (UBC) - Department of Economics; National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)) & David A. Wise (National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER); Harvard University - Harvard Kennedy School (HKS)) This is the introduction and summary to the eighth phase of an ongoing project on Social Security Programs and Retirement Around the World. This project, which compares the experiences of a dozen developed countries,...