April 2020
04Apr

The Future of Pension Plans in the EU Internal Market: Coping with Trade-Offs Between Social Rights and Capital Markets

By Nazaré da Costa Cabral, Nuno Cunha Rodrigues This edited volume takes a closer look at various European pension-plan models and the recent challenges, trends and predictions related to the design of such schemes. The contributors analyse new ideas, both from national governments and European institutions, and consider current debates on topics such as the Capital Markets Union (CMU) and the so-called ‘European Pillar of Social Rights’ – calling for a new approach to social policy at the...

April 4, 2020
Books, Pension design, Regulation, System Sustainability, ,
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03Apr

Pension Policy in Europe and the United States – Towards a New Public-Private Pension Mix

By Onorato Castellino, Elsa Fornero, Christina Benita Wilke Pension reform has occupied and will continue to occupy an important place in the welfare state reform agenda on both sides of the Atlantic. In both the European Union (EU) and the United States (US) demographic forces in the form of an aging population and low fertility pose significant long-run fiscal challenges to traditional public pay-as-you-go (PAYG) systems. In addition, the pace of pension reforms in most EU countries has accelerated...

April 3, 2020
Articles, Pension design, , ,
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March 2020
13Mar

Social Security and Financial Security at Older Ages

By Jeffrey R. Brown, James J. Choi, Courtney Coile, Richard Woodbury Beginning in September 2003, the Retirement Research Center at the National Bureau of Economic Research conducted a coordinated series of investigations on Social Security in an environment of continually changing demographics, health trends, longevity, labor markets, economic conditions, and other factors. The Center has supported extensive collaborative research over a multiyear horizon to achieve a more fully integrated understanding of Social Security’s challenges and the changing environment in...

March 13, 2020
Aging, Articles, Pension design,
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09Mar

Reverse Mortgages, Financial Inclusion, and Economic Development: Potential Benefit and Risks

By Peter Knaack, Margaret Miller, Fiona Stewart This paper examines the state of reverse mortgage markets in selected countries around the world and considers the potential benefits and risks of these products from a financial inclusion and economic benefit standpoint. Despite potentially increasing demand from aging societies -- combined with limited pension income -- a series of market failures constrain supply and demand. The paper discusses a series of market failures on the supply side, such as adverse selection,...

March 9, 2020
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07Mar

Financial Operating Systems

By Dirk A. Zetzsche, William A. Birdthistle, Douglas W. Arner, Ross P. Buckley One of the most consequential and unexamined developments in global finance has been the recent emergence of massive concentrations of financial technology under the control of individual firms. These financial operating systems are, like computing operating systems, relatively inconspicuous yet extraordinarily powerful. They already dominate the world’s $50 trillion investment fund industry, where they play a critical role in asset management for pensions and institutional investors,...

March 7, 2020
Articles, Pension design,
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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
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28Feb

Poverty Reduction Among Older People Through Pensions: A Comparative Analysis

By Olaf van Vliet, Koen Caminada, Kees Goudswaard, Jinxian Wang Given the ageing of the populations in many Western countries, older people constitute an important group in the analysis of poverty. In this chapter, we examine the poverty incidence among older people across LIS countries, relying on data from the Luxembourg Income Study. The data show that poverty rates are substantially reduced by redistribution via tax/benefit systems (mainly via pension benefits). Furthermore, the data show that old-age poverty rates...

February 28, 2020
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22Feb

Financial incentives and retirement savings

By OECD Launched in 2014, this project is reviewing the cost effectiveness of tax and other financial incentives. It is assessing more efficient ways of using public money to increase savings for retirement, retirement income and replacement rates. The project is taking into account the distributional impact of various measures and will examine alternative means of encouraging saving in complementary private pension plans other than current tax advantages. The project addresses three key questions that interest policy makers: What the different fiscal...

February 22, 2020
Books, Books, Pension design, Savings, System Sustainability,
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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
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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
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