July 2023

COVID-19, Home Equity and Retirement Funding

By Vishaal Baulkaran & Pawan Jain  We investigate the impact of COVID-19 on using home equity to fund retirement income. We show that financial planners believe that COVID-19 positively influenced their clients’ willingness to utilize home equity products to fund retirement income in particular, sell and downsize and HELOC options. For consumers, COVID-19 does not seem to have a major impact on the outlook on residential property, retirement income, retirement plan, or perceived/actual standard of living during retirement. However, there...

Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Retirement Outcomes: Impacts of Outreach

By Angelino Viceisza, Amaia Calhoun & Gabriella J.O. Lee We review select literature on racial and ethnic disparities in retirement outcomes in the United States and the impact of outreach on such outcomes. First, there are significant disparities in retirement outcomes, reflecting a long history of racism and structural barriers. Second, there is comparatively little work on the differential impact of retirement outreach across race and ethnicity. Future work should consider designing interventions that cater to the needs of specific...

June 2023

The State of Longevity 2021

By Daragh Campbell  2021 demonstrated that research into antiaging therapies is going from strength-to-strength, and our review of longevity clinical trials shows this clearly. As different areas of research continue to gain traction (cellular reprogramming, in particular), we wanted to analyse exactly how the longevity clinical trial market performed last year. In order to assess clinical trial data across 2021, we interrogated the Longevity.Technology database, which consists of over 250 longevity companies (and growing all the time!). This was used to...

May 2023

Access to Pensions, Old-Age Support, and Child Investment in the People’s Republic of China

By Xiaoyue Shan & Albert Park This paper studies how access to public pensions affects old-age support and child investment in traditional societies. Guided by predictions from an overlapping generations model, we analyze the influences of a new pension program in rural People’s Republic of China, using a difference-in-differences approach. We find that the program crowds out transfers from working-age adults, especially men, to their elderly parents. Interestingly, the impact on child investment significantly differs by child gender. While adult...

“Milliman’s Pension Funding Index. May 2023”

By Milliman The funded status of the nation’s 100 largest corporate defined benefit pension plans decreased by $7 billion during April, as measured by the Milliman 100 Pension Funding Index (PFI). A decrease in the benchmark corporate bond interest rates used to value pension liabilities led to an increase in these liabilities of $10 billion for the month. As of April 30, the funded ratio fell to 99.5%, from 100.1% at the end of March. April saw the funding surplus...

International Comparison of Pension Systems: An Investigation from Consumers’ Viewpoint

By Hongmu Lee, Gianni Nicolini & Man Cho  A secure and adequate pension system is central to establishing a welfare state. Given that, this book aims to document a set of diverse Public policy issues on the financial consumers standpoint that are observed in different countries. In this introductory chapter, we attempt to summarize those policy issues that emerged from the survey of the countries included with respect to each of the three dimensions- adequacy, coverage, and sustainability.   Book "here"

The Effects of Non-Contributory Pensions on Material and Subjective Well Being

By Rosangela Bando, Sebastian Galiani & Paul Gertler Public expenditures on non-contributory pensions are equivalent to at least 1 percent of GDP in several countries in Latin America and is expected to increase. We explore the effect of non-contributory pensions on the well-being of the beneficiary population by studying the Pension 65 program in Peru, which uses a poverty eligibility threshold. We find that the program reduced the average score of beneficiaries on the Geriatric Depression Scale by nine percent...

April 2023

Reforming against the demographic clock

By Allianz Research  The Covid-19 pandemic erased life-expectancy gains of almost a decade, pushing population aging and pension reform into the background. In fact, to alleviate the financial burden on private households and companies, governments not only put together aid packages worth billions of euros that drove up national debt, but also postponed already agreed upon reform measures, lowered contribution rates and allowed early withdrawals from retirement plans. As a result, the build-up of future pension entitlements and retirement savings slowed,...

March 2023

The gender gap in pension saving

By Jonathan Cribb, Heidi Karjalainen & Laurence O’Brien This report is an output from a programme of research on ‘Pension saving over the lifecycle’ (WEL /FR-000000374) that is funded by the Nuffield Foundation. Co-funding from the ESRCfunded Centre for the Microeconomic Analysis of Public Policy (ES/T014334/1) is also gratefully acknowledged. We are grateful to Alex Beer, Carl Emmerson and Paul Johnson for useful comments, and to Rowena Crawford for discussion and advice on this work. This work was produced using data from...

Pay-as-They-Get-In: Attitudes Towards Migrants and Pension Systems

By Tito Boeri, Matteo Gamalerio, Massimo Morelli & Margherita Negri We study whether a better knowledge of the functioning of pay-as-you-go pension systems and recent demographic trends in the hosting country affects natives' attitudes towards immigration. In two online experiments in Italy and Spain, we randomly treated participants with a video explaining how, in pay-as-you-go pension systems, the payment of current pensions depends on the contributions paid by current workers. The video also explains that the ratio between the number of...