August 2017

Do Stereotypes About Older Workers Change? Evidence from a Panel Study Among Employers

By Hendrik P. van Dalen (Tilburg University) & Kene Henkens (Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute) Background: Stereotypies of older workers and their productive value are believed to contrast with their actual potential. Still, these stereotypes among employers persist. Objective: This article examines whether managers have changed their views on older workers and if so what the driving forces are of these changes. Methods: Using panel data we examine the changes in attitudes among Dutch managers about the productive skills of older workers (50...

July 2017

Life-Cycle Earnings Curves and Safe Savings Rates

By Derek Tharp (Kansas State University) & Michael E. Kitces (The Kitces Report & Nerd's Eye View) Traditional analyses of recommended savings ratios and safe savings rates (SSRs) typically assume constant real earnings growth throughout the one’s career. However, data on the life-cycle earnings patterns of millions of U.S. workers suggests that earnings growth does not occur at a constant rate that matches inflation. Instead, earnings tend to increase at a decreasing rate during the early years of one’s career...

June 2017

What Rates of Productivity Growth Would Be Required to Offset the Effects of Population Aging? A Study of Twenty Industrialised Countries

By Frank T. Denton & Byron G. Spencer (McMaster University) A shift in population distribution toward older ages is underway in industrialised countries throughout the world and will continue well into the future. We provide a framework for isolating the pure effects of population aging on per capita GDP, employ the framework in calculations for twenty OECD countries, and derive the rates of productivity growth required to offset those effects. We consider also some labour-related changes that might provide offsets,...

We’ll Live to 100 – How Can We Afford It?

The challenges we face to provide our ageing societies with a financially secure retirement are well-known. In most countries around the world, standards of living and healthcare advancements are allowing people to live longer. This should be celebrated, but we should also consider the implications for the financial systems that have been designed to meet our retirement needs, which in many countries are already under severe strain. This report has been produced as part of the Forum’s Retirement Investment Systems...

April 2017

Time for Retirement ‘Selfies’?

By Robert C. Merton (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) & Arun Muralidhar (George Washington University) To address the looming retirement crisis, many governments are introducing new pension programmes tied to employment for uncovered workers (NEST in the UK and Secure Choice in some US states). These attempt to improve access to pensions, and continue a trend of transferring responsibility for retirement security from governments and employers (via defined benefit [DB] plans) to the individual (via defined contribution [DC] plans), as neither...

March 2017

Beyond the Privatisation and Re-Nationalisation of the Argentine Pension System: Coverage, Fragmentation, and Sustainability

By Fabio Bertranou & Luis Casanova (International Labour Organization);  Oscar Cetrángolo & Carlos Grushka (University of Buenos Aires) In the last decades, the pension system in Argentina has experienced important changes that included the introduction of an individual account defined-contribution component (or individual capitalisation) in 1994 and its subsequent reversal to a defined benefit pay-as-you-go pension scheme in 2008. After the 2001 crisis, the favourable fiscal position allowed the implementation of policies that reversed the decline in pension coverage to unprecedented...

Problems of Reforming the Institute of Early Pensions for Work in Harmful and Hazardous Conditions

By Yury Mikhailovich Gorlin, Nadezhda Galieva, Elena E. Grishina, Marina A. Eliseeva, Vladimir Kartavtsev & Anna Cheremnykh (RANEPA) One of the main lines of the strategy for long-term development of the pension system of the Russian Federation, approved by the Resolution of the Russian Government is the reform of early retirement institute. In this area Russian Government set an additional tariff of insurance premiums for employers who offer hazardous work; a special assessment of the working conditions is being made,...

February 2017

Health, Health Insurance, and Retirement: A Survey

By Eric French & John Bailey Jones (Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond) Abstract:      The degree to which retirement decisions are driven by health is a key concern for both academics and policymakers. In this paper we survey the economic literature on the health-retirement link in developed countries. We describe the mechanisms through which health affects labor supply and discuss how they interact with public pensions and public health insurance. The historical evidence suggests that health is not the...

Understanding the dynamics of labor income inequality in Latin America

By Carlos Rodriguez Castelan, Luis Felipe Lopez-Calva, Nora Lustig & Daniel Valderrama Since the early 2000s, after a long period of wide and persistent gaps, Latin America has experienced a steady decline in income inequality. This paper presents evidence of a trend reversal in labor income inequality, which is considered the main factor behind such a decline in income inequality across the region. The analysis shows that, while labor income inequality increased during the 1990s, with heterogeneous experiences across countries,...

Lessons for an Aging Society: The Political Sustainability of Social Security Systems

By Vincenzo Galasso & Paola Profeta What is the future of social security systems in OECD countries? In our view, the answer belongs to the realm of politics. We evaluate how political constraints shape the social security system in six countries - France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the UK and the US - under population aging. Two main aspects of the aging process are relevant to the analysis. First, the increase in the dependency ratio - the ratio of retirees to...