February 2017

04Feb

Borrowing from the Future: 401(k) Plan Loans and Loan Defaults

By Timothy (Jun) Lu, Olivia S. Mitchell, Stephen P. Utkus & Jean A. Young Tax-qualified retirement plans seek to promote saving for retirement, yet most employers permit pre-retirement access by letting 401(k) participants borrow plan assets. This paper examines who borrows and why, and who defaults on their loans. Our administrative dataset tracks several hundred plans over 5 years, showing that 20% borrow at any given time, and almost 40% do at some point over five years. Employer policies influence...

February 4, 2017
Labor Market, Savings,
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04Feb

The Separation of Intelligence and Control: Retirement Savings and the Limits of Soft Paternalism

By Jacob Russell “Soft paternalism” is in vogue among academics and lawmakers, but too much is being asked of it. This Article studies soft paternalist techniques — including nudging and disclosure — that have been used in the employer-sponsored retirement system. Defined-contribution retirement plans represent an ideal test case for libertarian paternalism: there has been extensive experimentation, and it has often been held up as a success by nudge advocates. In particular, this Article focuses on investment allocation decisions in...

February 4, 2017
Articles, Regulation, Savings,
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04Feb

The Life-Cycle Personal Accounts Proposal for Social Security: An Evaluation

By Robert J. Shiller The life-cycle accounts proposal for Social Security reform has been justified by its proponents using a number of different arguments, but these arguments generally involve the assumption of a high likelihood of good returns on the accounts. A simulation is undertaken to estimate the probability distribution of returns in the accounts based on long-term historical experience. U.S. stock market, bond market and money market data 1871-2004 are used for the analysis. Assuming that future returns behave...

February 4, 2017
Articles, Labor Market, Savings
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04Feb

Financial Literacy and Financial Education: Review and Policy Implications

By Annamaria Lusardi In recent years, as workers have gained an unprecedented degree of control over their pensions and savings, the importance of financial literacy and financial education has increased considerably. Large changes in the structure of financial markets, labor markets, and demographics in developed countries have led to this change. Consumers have a bewildering array of complex financial products - from reverse mortgages to annuities - to choose from, making saving decisions increasingly complex. Knowledge about the working of...

February 4, 2017
Articles, Regulation, Savings,
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04Feb

World Bank Pension Reforms and Development Patterns in the World System and in the Wider Europe: A 109 Country Investigation Based on 33 Indicators of Economic Growth, and Human, Social and Ecological Well-Being, and a European Regional Case Study

By Arno Tausch On the first anniversary of the death of Nobel Laureate Professor Franco Modigliani, the Luxembourg Institute for European and International Studies (LIEIS) organised a conference on 'Reforming European Pension Systems' on 24 and 25 September 2004 in Schengen. Initially, the intention was to hold this conference in the presence of Professor Modigliani who had written a comprehensive paper for the LIEIS. However, due to ill health, such a meeting had to be postponed repeatedly. A third date was...

February 4, 2017
Adequacy, Articles, Regulation, Savings, , ,
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04Feb

Strategic and Tactical Allocation to Commodities for Retirement Savings Schemes

By Theo Nijman & Adrianus Petrus Swinkels We examine whether the variance risk of investment portfolios of pension schemes investing in traditional asset classes can be reduced by extending the set of traditional investment opportunities with commodities. We investigate the economic and statistical significance of shifts in the strategic (three year), myopic (quarterly), and tactical (quarterly rebalancing) mean-variance frontier for pension schemes with a fixed liability portfolio. We find substantial differences in optimal strategic allocations for pension schemes with nominal...

February 4, 2017
Articles, Investing, Savings,
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03Feb

Risky Choices: Simulating Public Pension Funding Stress with Realistic Shocks

By James Farrell, Daniel Shoag State and local government pension funds in the United States collectively manage a very large and diverse pool of assets to meet the even large sum of accrued liabilities. Recent research has emphasized that widely-used accounting practices, like matching discount rates to expected asset returns, understate the market value of these liabilities. Less work has explored the risks inherent in existing diverse set asset allocations, and the accounting practices used by most state and local...

February 3, 2017
Articles, Investing, Savings, ,
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03Feb

Defined ambition pensions – Have the Dutch found the golden mean for retirement savings?

By Erik Schouten & Thurstan Robinson In February 2012, the UK minister for pensions proposed that companies should perhaps be able to provide a new type of pension – Defi ned Aspiration pensions or Defi ned Ambition (DA) pensions, as they are called in the Netherlands. In this article, we take a closer look at DA pensions, examining the Dutch experiences to date with the introduction of DA pensions . We look at what DA pensions have to offer employers...

February 3, 2017
Articles, Savings, System Sustainability, ,
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03Feb

Beyond Contributory Pensions : Fourteen Experiences with Coverage Expansion in Latin America

By Rafael Rofman, Ignacio Apella and Evelyn Vezza Latin America's population is aging, and many among the growing elderly population are not protected by traditional pension schemes. In response, policy makers have been reevaluating their income protection systems so that between 2000 and 2013, the majority of Latin American countries reformed their social pension schemes to provide near-universal coverage for the elderly. Before this unprecedented wave of reform, most income protection in Latin America was provided through contributory pensions available...

February 3, 2017
Savings, System Sustainability
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03Feb

Market risk analysis for Mexico´s pension funds: an autoregressive approach

By Marissa Martínez and Francisco Venegas The aim of this paper is to analyze the market risk of two types of investment funds, Basic SIEFORE 1 (SB1) and Basic SIEFORE 2 (SB2). To do this, we propose a performance index that will be used in ARIMA-GARCH models and some of its extensions, with the purpose of examining the dynamic behavior of the returns and their volatility on such investment funds. Moreover, the risk premium of both types of funds is...

February 3, 2017
Investing, Savings,
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