Labor Market Archives - Page 46 of 52 - Pension Policy International

23FebFebruary 23, 2017

Pensions, Retirement, and the Disutility of Labor: Bunching in Brazil

By Benjamin Thompson (University of Michigan) Abstract: Elderly workers in developing countries face certain frictions, such as credit constraints, in their retirement decisions that may not be as common among their counterparts in the developed world, and these concerns may lead workers to work more or less than their preferred number of years. In this study, I firstly use regression discontinuity methods to show that a large fraction of urban male heads of households in Brazil (roughly 45%)...

February 23, 2017

Articles, Labor Market, Pension designCoverage, Labor Market, Social Protection

23FebFebruary 23, 2017

Health, Health Insurance, and Retirement: A Survey

By Eric French & John Bailey Jones (Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond) Abstract: The degree to which retirement decisions are driven by health is a key concern for both academics and policymakers. In this paper we survey the economic literature on the health-retirement link in developed countries. We describe the mechanisms through which health affects labor supply and discuss how they interact with public pensions and public health insurance. The historical evidence suggests that health is not the...

February 23, 2017

Aging, Labor Market, Pension designAging, Regulation, Social Pensions

05FebFebruary 5, 2017

Employee Saving and Investment Decisions in Defined Contribution Pension Plans: Survey Evidence from the UK

By Alistair Byrne This paper uses data from a survey of the members of a UK defined contribution pension plan to explore the attitudes and knowledge of employees faced with pension saving and investment decisions. The results are consistent with behavioural economics in that many employees show limited interest in their pension arrangements. Not all members have received advice about their pension, but those who have are more likely to have calculated their savings needs, to have higher levels of...

February 5, 2017

Articles, Investing, Labor Market, SavingsSocial Pensions, Social Protection

04FebFebruary 4, 2017

Savings After Retirement: A Survey

By Mariacristina De Nardi, Eric French,& John B. Jones The saving patterns of retired U.S. households pose a challenge to the basic life-cycle model of saving. The observed patterns of out-of-pocket medical expenses, which rise quickly with age and income during retirement, and heterogeneous lifespan risk, can explain a significant portion U.S. savings during retirement. However, more work is needed to disentangle these precautionary saving motives from other motives, such as the desire to leave bequests. An important complementary question...

February 4, 2017

Articles, Labor Market, SavingsBehavior, Financial Education, Financial Inclusion

04FebFebruary 4, 2017

Retirement Security in an Aging Society

By James M. Poterba The share of the U.S. population over the age of 65 was 8.1 percent in 1950, 12.4 percent in 2000, and is projected to reach 20.9 percent by 2050. The percent over 85 is projected to more than double from current levels, reaching 4.2 percent by mid-century. The aging of the U.S. population makes issues of retirement security increasingly important. Elderly individuals exhibit wide disparities in their sources of income. For those in the bottom half of...

February 4, 2017

Aging, Articles, Labor Market, SavingsBehavior, Financial Education, Investment

04FebFebruary 4, 2017

Do Employer Pension Contributions Reflect Employee Preferences? Evidence from a Retirement Savings Reform in Denmark

By Itzik Fadlon, Jessica A. Laird & Torben Heien Nielsen This paper studies how firms set contributions to employer-provided 401(k)-type pension plans. Using a reform that decreased the subsidy for contributions to capital pension accounts for Danish workers in the top income tax bracket, we provide strong evidence that employers' contributions are based on their employees' savings preferences. We find an immediate decrease in employer contributions to capital accounts, whose magnitude increased in the share of employees directly affected by...

February 4, 2017

Articles, Labor Market, SavingsBehavior, Sustainability

04FebFebruary 4, 2017

Do Savings Increase in Response to Salient Information about Retirement and Expected Pensions?

By Mathias Dolls, Philipp Doerrenberg, Andreas Peichl & Holger Stichnoth How can retirement savings be increased? We explore a unique policy change in the context of the German pension system to study this question. As of 2004, the German pension authority started to send out annual letters providing detailed and comprehensible information about the pension system and individual expected pension payments. This reform did not change the level of pensions, but only manipulated the knowledge about and salience of expected...

February 4, 2017

Articles, Labor Market, SavingsBehavior

04FebFebruary 4, 2017

Do Financial Advisers Influence Savings Behavior?

By Jeremy Burke & Angela A. Hung There is substantial evidence that Americans tend to have low financial literacy (Lusardi and Mitchell, 2013) and are struggling with building sufficient wealth for a secure retirement (Helman et al., 2014). Financial advisers can play an important role by helping individuals make better financial decisions and improving their financial situations. However, there is limited and mixed evidence about the benefits to using a financial adviser. For example, as summarized in Burke et al....

February 4, 2017

Books, Investing, Labor Market, SavingsBehavior, Financial Education

04FebFebruary 4, 2017

What You Don’t Know Can’t Help You: Pension Knowledge and Retirement Decision-Making

By Sewin Chan & Ann Huff Stevens This paper provides an answer to an important empirical puzzle in the retirement literature: while most people know little about their own pension plans, retirement behavior is strongly affected by pension incentives. We combine administrative and self-reported pension data to measure the retirement response to actual and perceived financial incentives and document an important role for self-reported pension data in determining retirement behavior. Well-informed individuals are far more responsive to pension incentives than...

February 4, 2017

Articles, Investing, Labor Market, SavingsBehavior, Financial Education, Financial Inclusion, Social Protection

04FebFebruary 4, 2017

What You Don't Know Can't Help You: Pension Knowledge and Retirement Decision-Making

By Sewin Chan & Ann Huff Stevens This paper provides an answer to an important empirical puzzle in the retirement literature: while most people know little about their own pension plans, retirement behavior is strongly affected by pension incentives. We combine administrative and self-reported pension data to measure the retirement response to actual and perceived financial incentives and document an important role for self-reported pension data in determining retirement behavior. Well-informed individuals are far more responsive to pension incentives than...

February 4, 2017

Articles, Investing, Labor Market, SavingsBehavior, Financial Education, Financial Inclusion, Social Protection

February 2017