January 2021

29Jan

Unearned Income and Labor Supply: Evidence from Survivor Pensions in Austria

By René Böheim, Michael Topf We study the effect of lower unearned income on labor supply. To identify the causal effect of an unexpected reduction in unearned income, we exploit a policy reform that lowered survivor pensions in Austria. Men widowed after the survivor pension reform received an approximately 34% lower survivor pension than men widowed before the reform. We follow the employment history of both groups for 150 months and estimate the reform’s effect on labor supply using...

January 29, 2021
Articles, Pension design, , , ,
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28Jan

South Africa take-home pay numbers decline

The steep decline in the number of take-home payments has adjusted the average South African salary by a few percentage points, according to the BankservAfrica Take-home Pay Index (BTPI) for December 2020. “The real average take-home pay increased by 2,1% year-on-year,” says Shergeran Naidoo, BankservAfrica’s Head of Stakeholder Engagements. “The reason behind this is not positive. The average salary rose as a result of the decline in the number of lower paid earners that led to a 5,4% nominal...

January 28, 2021
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21Jan

Olivia S. Mitchell, PhD: Calibrating Retirement Planning with Current Conditions

By Olivia S. Mitchell In September 2020, Robert Powell, editor-in-chief of the Retirement Management Journal, Jason Fichtner, PhD, senior lecturer at the Johns Hopkins University; and Anna Rappaport, FSA, MAAA, chair of the Society of Actuaries Committee on Post-Retirement Needs and Risks, spoke with Mitchell about how longer lifespans and prolonged retirement periods are requiring adjustments to Social Security benefits, employee pension plans, and individual retirement savings. Source: SSRN

January 21, 2021
Adequacy, Aging, Articles, Pension design, , ,
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20Jan

Hong Kong’s jobless rate hits 16-year high

Hong Kong's jobless rate hit a 16-year high in the October-December period as the fourth wave of the COVID-19 outbreak further compounded the labor market situation, official data showed Tuesday. The seasonally adjusted unemployment rate rose from 6.3 percent in the September-November period to 6.6 percent in the October-December period, the Census and Statistics Department of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) government said in a press release. Meanwhile, the underemployment rate remained unchanged at 3.4 percent, showed...

January 20, 2021
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December 2020

23Dec

Understanding Debt in the Older Population

By Annamaria Lusardi, Olivia S. Mitchell, Noemi Oggero Poor financial capability can erode well-being in later life. To explore debt and debt management among older Americans, age 51-61, we designed and analyzed a new module in the 2018 Health and Retirement Study along with information from the 2018 National Financial Capability Study. Even though this group should be at the peak of their retirement savings, it nevertheless carries debt due to student loans and unpaid medical bills; having children...

December 23, 2020
Adequacy, Aging, Articles, , ,
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11Dec

Latin America’s Lost Decades The Toll of Inequality in the Age of COVID-19

By Luis Alberto Moreno During the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, in March 2020, Guayaquil, Ecuador’s business capital of some three million people, was in trouble. By a twist of fate, more than 20,000 Ecuadorians had just returned home from their seasonal vacations. Many had come from Italy and Spain, two coronavirus hot spots, with the earliest and most deadly outbreaks of COVID-19. President Lenín Moreno understood that the threat was serious but opted, at first, not to close...

December 11, 2020
Articles, System Sustainability, , ,
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03Dec

Financial Circuit

By Dr. Anurag Kumar Jha This book is a kind of roadmap which shows the path of financial inclusion. Although several works have been done on the present topic but its uniqueness lies on the fact that it connects digital India to become Atma Nirbhar Bharat. It is a kind of journey where every kind of people either rich or poor can be located digitally and financially. How individual and businesses have access to useful and affordable financial product...

December 3, 2020
Books, Informal Sector, , , ,
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November 2020

27Nov

With more childcare and domestic work, the pandemic poses a ‘real danger’ to women’s progress, UN finds

Since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, women have been bearing the brunt of extra childcare duties and unpaid domestic work, a study by the United Nations (UN) has found. Women in a number of countries around the world have been spending around 31 hours on average a week on childcare, the study by the UN’s gender equality body, UN Women, found. This was an average 5.2 hours a week more than pre-pandemic time spent on childcare,...

November 27, 2020
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20Nov

US. Nearly 30 Million Baby Boomers Forced Into Unwanted Retirement

In the third quarter of 2020, roughly 28.6 million Baby Boomers have left the job market and retired, according to the Pew Research Center. The study shows that Covid-19 has contributed to the rapid increase of Boomers—born between 1946 and 1964—being forced out of the labor market. Since the onset of the outbreak, the number of Boomer-aged retirees has increased by about 1.1 million. Over 65 million Americans have filed for unemployment benefits since March...

November 20, 2020
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05Nov

The Great Demographic Reversal: Ageing Societies, Waning Inequality, and an Inflation Revival

By Charles Goodhart, Manoj Pradhan This original and panoramic book proposes that the underlying forces of demography and globalisation will shortly reverse three multi-decade global trends – it will raise inflation and interest rates, but lead to a pullback in inequality. “Whatever the future holds”, the authors argue, “it will be nothing like the past”. Deflationary headwinds over the last three decades have been primarily due to an enormous surge in the world’s available labour supply, owing...

November 5, 2020
Aging, Books, , , ,
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