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June 2022

Greening Pensions: A Behavioural Perspective

By Alice Farrell, Kristina Londakova, Izzy Brennan, Jake Reynolds & Toby Park Through their pensions, the vast majority of people in the UK are investors, with pension pots collectively amounting to over £2.6 trillion.1 Investing a greater portion of this money sustainably - i.e. in businesses who have positive or neutral impacts on the environment and green technologies – could significantly accelerate our transition to a low-carbon society. While 68% of people say they would like their investments to be responsible...

Financial Literacy, Gender and Investment Choices

By Xin Wen, Zhiming Cheng & Massimiliano Tani Over the past thirty years Chinese households have enjoyed substantive increases in income and savings and witnessed a rapidly developing financial market offering investment choices and risks away from bank deposits – the traditional form of financial investment. We explore whether this evolving landscape has been advantageous to every investor or mainly those with better financial literacy, by focusing on the portfolio decisions of the household head, by gender. Using data from...

Do Retirees Want to Consume More, Less or the Same as they Age?

By Anqi Chen & Alicia H. Munnell Whether households prefer a constant, increasing, or decreasing path of consumption in retirement has important implications for our understanding of retirement adequacy. Financial planners and researchers often assume that retirees would like to maintain a constant standard of living. Similarly, Social Security benefits are based on the premise that people want steady inflation-adjusted benefits. However, several studies suggest that retired households actually decrease their consumption over time. This brief, which reports the results of...

LGBT: Retirement Preparations Amid Social Progress

By AEGON LGBT: Retirement Preparations Amid Social Progress is a collaboration between Aegon Center for Longevity and Retirement, and nonprofits Transamerica Center for Retirement Studies® (US), and Instituto de Longevidade Mongeral Aegon (Brazil). The report focuses on the retirement aspirations and plans among the LGBT community, and highlights findings from LGBT survey respondents from nine of the 15 surveyed countries comprising the 6th Annual Aegon Retirement Readiness Survey. Many of the traditional patterns of family and working life, including the way...

Factors Influencing the Choice of Pension Distribution at Retirement

By Robert L. Clark & Olivia S. Mitchell One of the most important financial decisions that pension participants make concerns how they access their pension assets when they terminate employment with their plan sponsor. Their choices depend both on own preferences and the options offered by their retirement plan. This paper examines both past and future pension withdrawal choices for those with defined benefit and defined contribution pensions, separately. Our data are drawn from a set of pension distribution questions...

Markets and Mandates: Retirement in Chile and the United States

By Manisha Padi Ordinary Americans are accustomed to a strict separation between private markets and public-benefits programs. Government programs, such as Social Security for retirees, disburse benefits to households without regard to the private options available to them. Conversely, private-market regulators, including the Securities and Exchange Commission, make rules about private retirement savings without accounting for public retirement benefits. The result is a disjointed experience for American retirees, whose public benefits are restricted by the Social Security Administration but whose...

May 2022

Serenity Now, Save Later? Evidence on Retirement Savings Puzzles from a 401(K) Field Experiment

By Saurabh Bhargava & Lynn Conell-Price Economists have advanced several psychological frictions to explain why many 401(k)-eligible employees undersave for retirement despite generous matching incentives. We provide evidence on four of these frictions through a field experiment randomizing undersaving employees to information- and incentive-based treatments linked to a survey assessing each friction’s baseline incidence. We describe four main findings: (1) We corroborate prior work showing pervasive deficits in retirement literacy and their correlation with saving but reject any meaningful increase...

The 2022 Pension Answer Book

By Stephen J. Krass A standard in its field, The 2022 Pension Answer Book discusses in detail the full spectrum of pension topics—from qualification requirements to taxation of distributions, from minimum distribution requirements to 401(k) plans. It covers the most up-to-date and significant legislative, regulatory, and case law developments affecting these plans. As a decision-making tool, combining theory and practice-based guidance, The 2022 Pension Answer Book offers insight and clarification on the critical issues affecting pension administration and compliance. In...

Impact of financial investment on the individual’s confidence of happy retirement life

By Yan-Leung Cheung, Billy S C Mak, Hao Shu & Weiqiang Tan The study examines the impact of financial investment on the individual’s confidence in happy retirement life using data from 735 respondents in the Bank Consortium Holding Limited (BCT) Public Opinion Survey on Retirement Happiness in 2017. The result shows that holding the investment portfolio with savings and risky assets is positively and significantly correlated with the individual’s confidence of happy retirement life, and this relationship is more pronounced...

What Share of Noncovered Public Employees Will Earn Benefits that Fall Short of Social Security?

By Jean-Pierre Aubry, Siyan Liu, Alicia H. Munnell, Laura Quinby & Glenn Springstead Social Security is designed to serve as the base of retirement support, to be supplemented by employer-sponsored plans. However, approximately one-quarter of state and local government employees – currently, around 5 million workers annually – are not covered by Social Security on their current job. Federal law allows these noncovered workers to remain outside of Social Security if their state or local plan provides comparable benefits. Since...