July 2020

Social Security Programs and Retirement Around the World: Disability Insurance Programs and Retirement

By David A Wise, Courtney C Coile, Kevin Milligan Even as life expectancy in many countries has continued to increase, social security and similar government programs can provide strong incentives for workers to leave the labor force when they reach the age of eligibility for benefits. Disability insurance programs can also play a significant role in the departure of older workers from the labor force, with many individuals in some countries relying on disability insurance until they are able...

The Promise of Fintech : Financial Inclusion in the Post COVID-19 Era

By Ratna Sahay, Ulric Eriksson von Allmen, Amina Lahreche, Purva Khera, Sumiko Ogawa, Majid Bazarbash, Kimberly Beaton Technology is changing the landscape of the financial sector, increasing access to financial services in profound ways. These changes have been in motion for several years, affecting nearly all countries in the world. During the COVID-19 pandemic, technology has created new opportunities for digital financial services to accelerate and enhance financial inclusion, amid social distancing and containment measures. At the same time, the...

June 2020

Saving Through a Crisis: How LMI Retirement Plan Participants Are Weathering COVID-19

By Warren Cormier, DCIIA, Nick Maynard & Sylvia Brown In the months since the outbreak of COVID-19, the pandemic has continued to expose and exacerbate cracks in people’s financial lives. In our latest research, Commonwealth partnered with the Defined Contribution Institutional Investment Association’s (DCIIA) Retirement Research Center on a series of surveys to better understand how low- to moderate-income (“LMI”) plan participants are handling their retirement savings during the pandemic and the impact to their financial security. ...

Delivering DC? Barriers to Participation in the Company-Sponsored Pensions Market

By: Debbie Harrison, Alistair Byrne, David P. Blake. The report shows that pension providers and advisers are finding it increasingly uneconomic to market to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and are withdrawing rather than redoubling their efforts. This is an important and difficult issue for both government and private sector providers. SOURCE: @SSRN

Returning to the Core: Rediscovering a Role for Real Estate in Defined Contribution Pension Schemes

By Debbie Harrison, David P. Blake, Tony Key The objective of the research was to analyse and evaluate the role of real estate in the UK’s defined contribution (DC) pensions market in relation to auto-enrollment – the new system of pension scheme provision for private sector employees in the UK, which is being phased in by all employers between October 2012 and 2018. The most important feature of auto-enrollment schemes is the ‘default fund’, which is the multi-asset investment strategy...

Building better retirement systems in the wake of the global pandemic

By Olivia S. Mitchell In the wake of the global pandemic known as COVID-19, retirees, along with those hoping to retire someday, have been shocked into a new awareness of the need for better risk management tools to handle longevity and aging. This paper offers an assessment of the status quo prior to the spread of the coronavirus, evaluates how retirement systems are faring in the wake of the shock. Next we examine insurance and financial market products that...

An Introduction to Pensionomics

By Mario Arturo Ruiz Estrada, Evangelos Koutronas Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the concept of pensionomics as a prospective tool for pension evaluation. This paper suggests a paradigm shift – a multi-disciplinary synthesis of differing perspectives in evaluating pension’s overall performance based on past work on pension evaluation – incorporating non-economic variables with significant impact on economic growth and social development. Design/methodology/approach – This paper suggests a new analytical tool called “Pensions Consistency (PC)...

Can Low Retirement Savings Be Rationalized?

By John B. Shoven, Sita Slavov, John G. Watson Simple presentations of the life cycle model often suggest a constant level of real consumption in retirement. Similarly, financial planners commonly suggest that people save for retirement in such a way as to enable them to maintain a level retirement standard of living equal to their standard of living while working. However, constant consumption with age is only optimal under the precise and unlikely condition that the subjective rate of...

May 2020

Pension Finance

By M Barton Waring, Robert C Merton Pension plans around the world are in a state of crisis. U.S. plans alone are facing a total accrued liability funding deficit of almost $4 trillion (of the same order of magnitude as the federal debt), a potential financial catastrophe that ranks among the largest ever seen. It has become clear that many government, corporate, and multi-employer pension sponsors will not be able to cope with this crippling debt and may default...

Allianz pension report 2020 the silver swan

By Allianz Even before the Covid-19 outbreak, societies were becoming more and more fragmented over several social fault lines: culture, education, wealth, place of residence. Many of these overlap: The cosmopolitan, well-educated, wealthy people live in (big) cities, whereas more conservative, low-skilled workers tend to live in the periphery. There is, however, one important social fault line that cuts through all these identities: the generation gap. With demographic and climate change (and now the coronavirus pandemic), the generational...