October 2018
16Oct

Stars Aligning For Corporate Plans to Take De-Risking Actions

The market volatility experienced in early to mid-October speaks to the importance of plan sponsors having a governance structure and framework in place to effectuate changes to their portfolios in a timely manner when funded levels rise. As we have seen in prior periods, improvements in funded status can dissipate quickly if portfolios are not adjusted to reduce asset and liability mismatches. A well-funded or even fully funded plan can still carry substantial risk for the sponsor if plan...

October 16, 2018
Articles, Corporate Governance, Pension design, , ,
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September 2018

17Sep

Medium-Run Implications of Changing Demographic Structures for the Macro-Economy

By Yunus Aksoy (Birkbeck, University of London),Henrique S. Basso (Birkbeck College, University of London) & Ron Smith (Birkbeck College) In the decade since the onset of the financial crisis, the disappointing recovery has sparked renewed concern about the medium-run outlook for advanced economies. Rather than returning to the pre-crisis trend, output has continued to diverge from it. It is difficult to know whether this is a cyclical phenomenon, a slow recovery towards steady state, or a secular change in the...

September 17, 2018
Aging, Articles, Labor Market, Savings, ,
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July 2018

31Jul

Under-Rewarded Efforts. The Elusive Quest for Prosperity in Mexico

By Santiago Levy My hope is that this book will appeal to all those interested in Mexico’s development. With that purpose in mind, I tried to write a book with a minimum of specialized language and technical terms, so it could be read by many. I hope academic economists find that the central elements of the narrative are sufficiently supported by empirical evidence, even if not all of them are treated with the technical rigor that they would like to...

July 31, 2018
Books, System Sustainability, ,
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30Jul

Aging in America: A Cultural History

By Lawrence R Samuel Aging is a preoccupation shared by beauty bloggers, serious journalists, scientists, doctors, celebrities--arguably all of adult America, given the pervasiveness of the crusade against it in popular culture and the media. We take our youth-oriented culture as a given but, as Lawrence R. Samuel argues, this was not always the case. Old age was revered in early America, in part because it was so rare. Indeed, it was not until the 1960s, according to Samuel, that...

July 30, 2018
Aging, Books, Labor Market, ,
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16Jul

The Mommy Effect: Do Women Anticipate the Employment Effects of Motherhood?

By Ilyana Kuziemko, Jessica Pan, Jenny Shen, Ebonya Washington After decades of convergence, the gender gap in employment outcomes has recently plateaued in many rich countries, despite the fact that women have increased their investment in human capital over this period. We propose a hypothesis to reconcile these two trends: that when they are making key human capital decisions, women in modern cohorts underestimate the impact of motherhood on their future labor supply. Using an event-study framework, we show substantial...

July 16, 2018
Articles, Labor Market, Pension design, , , ,
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09Jul

Financial stability implications of a prolonged period of low interest rates

From  Committee on the Global Financial System The decade following the Great Financial Crisis (GFC) has been marked by historically low interest rates. An environment characterised by "low-for-long" interest rates may dampen the profitability and strength of financial firms and thus become a source of vulnerability for the financial system. In addition, low rates could change firms' incentives to take risks, which could engender additional financial sector vulnerabilities. This report identifies and provides evidence for the channels through which a "low-for-long"...

July 9, 2018
Articles, System Sustainability, , ,
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06Jul

Demography and Provisions for Retirement: The Pension Composition, an Equilibrium Approach

By B.M.S. van Praag (University of Amsterdam) & J. Peter Hop (University of Amsterdam) Pensions may be provided for in a modern society by several methods, viz., voluntary individual savings, mandatory fully funded occupational pension systems, and mandatory social security financed by pay-as-you-go. The specific mixture of the three systems we will call the pension composition. We assume that individual workers decide about their own individual savings, that the fully funded occupational system is decided upon by the age cohort of...

July 6, 2018
Adequacy, Articles, Labor Market, Pension design, , , , ,
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June 2018

30Jun

Nigeria and the Development Quagmire: Prospects of Development through Agriculture, Food Security and Agro-Based Industrialization

By Tesky Timothy Agoben (University of Lagos, Faculty of Social Sciences, Department of Sociology ; Federal University, Ndufu-Alike, Ikwo) This paper focused on ‘The Prospects of Nigeria’s Development through Agriculture, National Food Security and Agro-Based Industrialization’. To effectively examined how these areas of the agricultural sector can serve as prospects for Nigeria’s development, the role of agriculture in a country’s development were highlighted and it was found out from previous agricultural and developmental journals that, agriculture has the potentials to...

June 30, 2018
Articles, System Sustainability, , ,
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25Jun

The Impact of Pensions and Insurance on Global Yield Curves

By Robin M. Greenwood (Harvard Business School) & Annette Vissing-Jorgensen (National Bureau of Economic Research) We document a strong effect of pension and insurance company (P&I) assets on the long end of the yield curve. Using data from 26 countries, the yield spread between 30-year and 10-year government bond yields is negatively related to the ratio of pension assets (in funded and private pension and life insurance arrangements) to GDP, suggesting that preferred-habitat demand by the P&I sector for long-dated...

June 25, 2018
System Sustainability, ,
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16Jun

Wage Determination in the Long Run, Real Wage Resistance and Unemployment: Multivariate Analysis of Cointegrating Relations in 10 OECD Economies

By Timo Tyrväinen (Bank of Finland) Over the past twenty years or so, unemployment has been increasing in most OECD economies.In the same period, there has been a considerable increase in the wedge between the real cost to the employer of hiring a worker and the net real wage received by the worker.The present study examines whether changes in the wedge (including various tax rates) may have generated long-lasting effects on real labour costs.Behaviour which generates this kind of outcome...

June 16, 2018
Aging, Articles, Labor Market,
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