February 2020

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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07Feb

Demography and Provisions for Retirement – the Pension Composition, a Behavioral Approach

By B.M.S. van Praag, J. Hop Pensions may be provided for in a modern society by a mix of several methods, namely by voluntary individual savings, mandatory fully-funded occupational pension systems, mandatory social security financed by pay-as-you-go, and old-fashioned hoarding in cash. Here, we call the specific mixture of the four systems the pension composition. We assume that individual workers decide on their own individual savings, that the fully-funded occupational system is decided upon by the age cohort of...

February 7, 2020
Articles, System Sustainability, , ,
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01Feb

Reforming Pensions in Developing and Transition Countries (Social Policy in a Development Context)

By K. Hujo This book moves beyond technical studies of pension systems by addressing the political economy of pension reform in different contexts. It provides insights into key issues related to pension policy and its developmental implications, drawing on selected country studies in Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Latin America. Get the book here

February 1, 2020
Books, Pension design, System Sustainability, , , , , ,
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01Feb

Challenges of Retirement Policy, Social Security Reform, and Retirement Income: A Discussion with Alicia H. Munnell, PhD

By Alicia H. Munnell, Robert Powell, Jason J. Fichtner, Teresa Ghilarducci Director of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, Alicia H. Munnell talked with with members of the Retirement Management Journal Editorial Advisory Board in February 2019 about the challenges of addressing retirement policy at the national level and the practical steps advisors can take to help support their clients in retirement. Source: SSRN

February 1, 2020
Articles, Regulation, System Sustainability, , ,
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January 2020

24Jan

OECD Reviews of Pension Systems: Portugal

By OECD This review provides policy recommendations on how to improve the Portuguese pension system, building on the OECD’s best practices in pension design. It details the Portuguese pension system and identifies its strengths and weaknesses based on cross-country comparisons. The Portuguese pension system consists of an old-age safety net, a pay-as-you-go defined benefit scheme and voluntary private savings. The safety net includes an old-age social pension and a complement (the so-called Complemento Solidário para Idosos or CSI), both...

January 24, 2020
Books, Pension design, System Sustainability, ,
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18Jan

Robert C. Merton and the Science of Finance

By Zvi Bodie Starting with his 1970 doctoral dissertation and continuing to today, Robert C. Merton has revolutionized the theory and practice of finance. In 1997 Merton shared a Nobel Prize in Economics “for a new method to determine the value of derivatives.” His contributions to the science of finance, however, go far beyond that. In this essay I describe Merton’s main contributions. They include the following: 1. The introduction of continuous-time stochastic models (the Ito calculus) to the theory...

January 18, 2020
Articles, Investing, System Sustainability,
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03Jan

Economics of Crisis

By Julia M. Puaschunder According to Semmler (2019), for speculations, currency and financial crises, the economic literature can be divided into three generations of models: (1) Focus on macroeconomic fundamentals (such as differences in economic growth rates, productivity and price levels, short-term interest rates as well as monetary policy actions) causing exchange rate movements. (2) Speculative forces – such as self-fulfilling expectations, which destabilize exchange rates without deterioration of fundamentals. (3) Following the theory of imperfect capital markets, self-fulfilling...

January 3, 2020
Articles, System Sustainability,
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December 2019

06Dec

Fintechs and financial inclusion

By Gayatri Murthy, Maria Fernandez-Vida As Fintech companies targeting poor and underserved customers grow and scale, there is a lack of granularity on how their business models solve pain points in financial inclusion and what the industry can learn from the iterations in their business models. CGAP launched a fintech initiative in 2016 to better understand these innovations and draw clear linkages to financial inclusion, where they existed. We worked with 18 fintechs in Africa and South Asia that...

December 6, 2019
Books, Labor Market, System Sustainability, ,
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06Dec

Exploring Wealth Inequality

By Cato Institute, Ryan Bourne, Chris Edwards Many political leaders and pundits consider wealth inequality to be a major economic and social problem. They complain about a shift of wealth to the top at everyone else’s expense and about plutocrats dominating policymaking in Washington. Is wealth inequality the crisis that some people believe? This study examines six aspects of wealth inequality and discusses the evidence for the claims being made. Section 1 describes how wealth inequality has risen in...

December 6, 2019
Adequacy, Articles, System Sustainability,
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November 2019

22Nov

Essentials of Pension Economics

By Sergio Nisticò This Palgrave Pivot provides a concise overview of pension systems which, whether paid by governments or by private companies, are the sole source of income for millions of people around the world. By 2050, two billion elderly people will have to be ensured some form of income while, at the same time, the prospect facing younger generations is of a gloomy future. This book breaks down the jargon, investigates different designs and analyses these designs'...

November 22, 2019
Aging, Books, System Sustainability,
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