May 2019

17May

Selfies for Portugal- An innovative Pan European Retirement Solution

By Robert C. Merton, Arun Muralidhar, Rui Seybert P Ferreira With a rapidly aging population, Portugal faces some serious pension challenges including a Social Security system which is under pressure, and pension benefits gradually approaching levels that will require individuals to supplement Social Security with private savings. In addition, Portugal has a low rate of financial literacy and hence transferring the responsibility of retirement planning to the general population runs a major risk of many individuals retiring poor. While some...

May 17, 2019
Articles, Pension design, Pension Management, , , , , ,
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November 2018

02Nov

Retirement Savings of the Hip Generation: A Study of Retirement Preparation among Individuals in Their Fifties

By M. Kabir Hassan (University of New Orleans - College of Business Administration - Department of Economics and Finance), Shari Lawrence (University of New Orleans - College of Business Administration - Department of Economics and Finance) Longer retirement periods coupled with the inadequacy of the Social Security system, low personal savings rates, and a decreasing trend in the prevalence of defined benefit retirement plans threaten to put a financial strain on individuals approaching retirement. To that end, we investigate retirement...

November 2, 2018
Articles, Savings, ,
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August 2018

07Aug

US. The Call to Care for Aging Parents Comes Sooner Now

Adrienne Glusman was 29, single and carefree when she became her mother’s caregiver. The only child of divorced parents, Ms. Glusman was living in New York City at the time, working, traveling, and going out with friends. Her mother, Hetty, in her mid-60s, was retired and living in Florida when she was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. It seemed manageable, until she fell, hit her head and wasn’t discovered for 12 hours. Read more The wall street journal

August 7, 2018
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June 2018

11Jun

Optimal Risk-Sharing in Pension Funds When Stock and Labor Markets are Co-Integrated

By Ilja Boelaars (University of Chicago) & Roel Mehlkopf (Tilburg University) A well established believe in the pension industry is that collective pension funds should take more stock market risk (compared to individual retirement accounts) since risk may be shared with future generations. We extend the OLG model of Gollier (2008) by adding labor income risk in the spirit of Benzoni, Collin-Dufresne, and Goldstein (2007) and show that this idea may be misguided. For the empirical range of parameter values...

June 11, 2018
Articles, Investing, Labor Market, , ,
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10Jun

Maybe the Gig Economy Isn’t Reshaping Work After All

By Ben Casselman You can see the gig economy everywhere but in the statistics. For years, economists, pundits and policymakers have grappled with the rise of Uber, the growth of temporary work and the fissuring of the relationship between companies and their workers. Optimists cheered the flexibility offered by the freelance life. Pessimists fretted about the disappearance of traditional jobs, with the benefits and legal protections they provided. That debate has played out largely in the absence of solid data. But on...

June 10, 2018
Articles, Labor Market, ,
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04Jun

Flexible or Mandatory Retirement? Welfare Implications of Retirement Policies for a Population With Heterogeneous Health Conditions

By Zhenhua Feng (Tsinghua University - Institute of Economics), Jaimie W. Lien (The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) - Department of Decision Sciences & Managerial Economics) & Jie Zheng (Tsinghua University - School of Economics & Management) A flexible retirement policy has often been proposed as a solution to address the social dilemma of individuals in the population having different desired retirement ages. We analyze such a policy in an overlapping generations general equilibrium framework, where individuals differ in...

June 4, 2018
Articles, Labor Market, Regulation, , ,
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May 2018

21May

Social Security Programs and Retirement Around the World: Working Longer

By Courtney Coile (Wellesley College; National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)), Kevin S. Milligan (University of British Columbia (UBC) - Department of Economics; National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)) & David A. Wise (National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER); Harvard University - Harvard Kennedy School (HKS)) This is the introduction and summary to the eighth phase of an ongoing project on Social Security Programs and Retirement Around the World. This project, which compares the experiences of a dozen developed countries,...

May 21, 2018
Articles, Labor Market, Regulation, Slider-Left, , ,
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April 2018

16Apr

Why Do Defaults Affect Behavior? Experimental Evidence from Afghanistan

By Joshua Blumenstock, Michael Callen, Tarek Ghani We report on an experiment examining why default options impact behavior. By randomly assigning employees to different varieties of a salary-linked savings account, we find that default enrollment increases participation by 40 percentage points—an effect equivalent to providing a 50% matching incentive. We then use a series of experimental interventions to differentiate between explanations for the default effect, which we conclude is driven largely by present-biased preferences and the cognitive cost of thinking...

April 16, 2018
Articles, Labor Market, Savings, ,
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March 2018

19Mar

When I’m Sixty-four: The Plot Against Pensions and the Plan to Save Them

By Teresa Ghilarducci A crisis is looming for baby boomers and anyone else who hopes to retire in the coming years. In When I'm Sixty-Four, Teresa Ghilarducci, the nation's leading authority on the economics of retirement, explains how to confront this crisis head-on, revealing the causes behind the increasingly precarious economics of old age in America and proposing a bold plan to guarantee retirement security for every working citizen. Retirement is one of the hallmarks of a prosperous, civilized market...

March 19, 2018
Books, Pension design, Savings, ,
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12Mar

Suggestions for a Scheme of Old Age Pensions: With an Introductory Chapter Dealing with the Report of the Committee on Old Age Pensions

By Lionel Holland Excerpt from Suggestions for a Scheme of Old Age Pensions: With an Introductory Chapter Dealing With the Report of the Committee on Old Age Pensions. The Report of the Committee on Old Age Pensions, which was appointed in July, 1896, has at length been issued. The circumstances which led up to the appoint ment of this Committee may be sufficiently indicated in a few sentences. Read more HERE

March 12, 2018
Books, Pension design
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