July 2019

19Jul

Reconstructing Retirement: Work and Welfare in the UK and USA

By David Lain In the United Kingdom, retirement programs are being reconstructed to follow the American practice of abolishing mandatory retirement and increasing state pension ages. This timely book compares prospects for work and retirement at age sixty five-plus in both the United States and the United Kingdom. After exploring the shifting logic behind both nations' policies--policies that increase both the need and opportunities to work past age sixty five--David Lain presents an original comparative statistical analysis on the...

July 19, 2019
Books, Pension design, System Sustainability, , , , ,
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12Jul

Digitalization and the Future of Work: Macroeconomic Consequences

By Melanie Arntz, Terry Gregory, Ulrich Zierahn Computing power continues to grow at an enormous rate. Simultaneously, more and better data is increasingly available and Machine Learning methods have seen significant breakthroughs in the recent past. All this pushes further the boundary of what machines can do. Nowadays increasingly complex tasks are automatable at a precision which seemed infeasible only few years ago. The examples range from voice and image recognition, playing Go, to self-driving vehicles. Machines are able...

July 12, 2019
Articles, Labor Market, System Sustainability, ,
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05Jul

Reforming Pensions While Retaining Shareholder Voice

By David H. Webber Public pension and labor union funds have been the driving force in diversified shareholder activism. They have also fended off attacks on jobs and proactively created jobs for fund contributors. These funds currently represent almost $4 trillion in assets over which workers have substantial control. That worker control - and the collective nature of defined benefit pension plans - is the necessary precondition for their shareholder activism. Both worker control and collective investment are directly...

July 5, 2019
Articles, Regulation, System Sustainability, , ,
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June 2019

28Jun

Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World

By Adam Tooze was the “day after Lehman.” It was the day global money markets seized up. At the Federal Reserve Board in Washington, DC, September 16 began with urgent plans to sluice hundreds of billions of dollars into the world’s central banks. On Wall Street all eyes were on AIG. Would the global insurance giant make it through the day, or would it follow the investment bank Lehman into oblivion? A shock wave was rippling outward. Within weeks...

June 28, 2019
Books, System Sustainability,
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28Jun

Switching Costs and Competition in Retirement Investment

By Fernando Luco How do different switching costs affect choices and competition in a private pension system? I answer this question in a setting in which variation in employment status allows me to identify two switching costs that jointly affect enrollees’ decisions: the cost of evaluating financial information and the cost of the bureaucratic process that enrollees must navigate when switching. I use this variation to estimate the different switching costs and study their impact on competition among pension...

June 28, 2019
Adequacy, Articles, Investing, System Sustainability,
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25Jun

Climate Impact Pledge: Tackling the climate emergency

By Meryam Omi Public concern about the danger posed by climate change has reached unprecedented levels. More than a million students have walked out of classes worldwide, while protests have been held across dozens of countries, to call for swift action from governments1. This is no fad. The world is truly in the midst of a climate emergency, which could have drastic consequences for markets, companies and, therefore, our clients’ assets. With the UN warning that there is little over...

June 25, 2019
Articles, Investing, Reports, System Sustainability, ,
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25Jun

Retirement Funding in South Africa 2019

The South African retirement funding sector, with assets in excess of R4.26-trillion, has the fifth highest assets-to-gross domestic product ratio in the world. However, less than 10% of retirement fund members are able to maintain their standard of living when they stop working and 41% of economically active South Africans have not made any provision for their retirement. Total membership of retirement funds rose from 16.6 million to 16.9 million in 2017, while total retirement fund contributions increased by...

June 25, 2019
Books, Reports, System Sustainability, ,
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14Jun

Evolving Eldercare in Contemporary China: Two Generations, One Decision (Series in Asian Labor and Welfare Policies) (English Edition)

By Lin Chen With an increasing number of elders moving into nursing homes, the shift from family to nursing home care calls for an exploration of caregiving decision-making in urban China. This study examines how a rapidly growing aging population, the one-child policy, and economic reform in urban China pose unprecedented challenges to the country’s ingrained tradition of family caregiving. It presents interviews of matched elders and their children from a government-sponsored nursing home in Shanghai and analyzes...

June 14, 2019
Books, Labor Market, System Sustainability, , , ,
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14Jun

The Future of Public Employee Retirement Systems (Pensions Research Council) (English Edition)

By Gary Anderson, Olivia S. Mitchell People covered by public pensions are often the subject of 'pension envy:' that is, their benefits might seem more generous and their contributions lower than those offered by the private sector. Yet this book points out that such judgments are often inaccurate, since civil servants hold jobs with few counterparts in private industry, such as firefighters, police, judges, and teachers. Often these are riskier, dirtier, and demand more loyalty and discretion than would...

June 14, 2019
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14Jun

The Effects of Pension-Related Policies on Household Spending

By Susana Párraga Rodríguez This paper estimates the impact of pension-related policies on household spending. The identification strategy exploits the deviation in pensioner income and expenditure caused by the introduction of a new pension system during the 1980s and 1990s in Spain and constructs a new narrative series of legislated pension changes. I present a variety of estimates, some of them imply that increases in the average pension have a roughly one-for-one effect on pensioner spending. The strongest effects...

June 14, 2019
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