October 2017

Recreating Sustainable Retirement: Resilience, Solvency, and Tail Risk (Pension Research Council Series)

by Pension Reseach Council (Author), Olivia S. Mitchell (Editor), Raimond Maurer (Editor), P.Brett Hammond (Editor) The financial crisis and the ensuing Great Recession alerted those seeking to protect old-age security, about the extreme risks confronting the financial and political institutions comprising our retirement system. The workforce of today and tomorrow must count on longer lives and deferred retirement, while at the same time it is taking on increased responsibility for managing retirement risk. This volume explores new ways to think about,...

A Survey of Behavioral Finance

By Nicholas Barberis, Richard Thaler Behavioral finance argues that some financial phenomena can plausibly be understood using models in which some agents are not fully rational. The field has two building blocks: limits to arbitrage, which argues that it can be difficult for rational traders to undo the dislocations caused by less rational traders; and psychology, which catalogues the kinds of deviations from full rationality we might expect to see. We discuss these two topics, and then present a number...

September 2017

Pension Schemes, Taxation and Stakeholder Wealth: The USS Rule Changes

By Emmanouil Platanakis (University of Bath) & Charles Sutcliffe (University of Reading) Although tax relief on pensions is a controversial area of government expenditure, this is the first study of the tax effects of a real world defined benefit pension scheme - the Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS). First, we estimate the tax and national insurance contribution (NIC) effects of the rule changes in 2011 on the gross and net wealth of the sponsor, government, and 16 age cohorts of members,...

The Economic Importance of Financial Literacy: Theory and Evidence

By Annamaria Lusardi & Olivia S. Mitchell In this paper, we undertake an assessment of the rapidly growing body of research on financial literacy. We start with an overview of theoretical research which casts financial knowledge as a form of investment in human capital. Endogenizing financial knowledge has important implications for welfare as well as policies intended to enhance levels of financial knowledge in the larger population. Next, we draw on recent surveys to establish how much (or how little)...

August 2017

Inmigracion y Sostenibilidad del Sistema de Pensiones En España

Por Carlos Borondo, Zen N Jim Nez-Ridruejo Ayuso, Carmen Lorenzo Lago Los procesos migratorios alteran sustancialmente los vinculos existentes entre las cotizaciones y las prestaciones en los sistemas publicos de pensiones. En el caso de Espana la evolucion demografica y del mercado de trabajo se han visto profundamente modificados por la presencia de un intenso flujo de inmigrantes, que han influido de un modo manifiesto sobre el balance y la capacidad del sistema de pensiones publicas de jubilacion, mejorando las...

El Desempeño de Los Sistemas de Pensiones Privados En Latinoamérica

Por: Jos Ricardo Duarte Ojeda, Carlos Elizalde S Nchez, Mar a Teresa Casparri Los sistemas de pensiones de America Latina han vivido una oleada de reformas sin precedente en la decada de los noventa; el pionero es el caso de Chile, que en 1981 ha migrado del sistema de Reparto (PAYGO) al sistema de capitalizacion individual. Es un contrastante cambio de politica de corte neoliberal que ha privatizado las pensiones de los trabajadores, ocasionando una variedad de resultados. Este libro...

Sistemas de Pensiones en America Latina y Mexico

Por Juana Isabel Vera Lopez A nivel mundial, los sistemas de pensiones se encuentran en crisis debido a que sus regimenes y beneficios consideraron una situacion distinta a la actual. Fenomenos como el envejecimiento poblacion, aumento de la esperanza de vida, el aumento del trabajo informal, subempleo, auto empleo, entre otros factores han agravado esta situacion. En Mexico, en 1995 y 2007 se reformaron las legislaciones del IMSS e ISSSTE siguiendo los parametros internacionales. En estas dos decadas transcurridas desde...

The State of Public Pension Funding: Are Government Employee Plans Back on Track?

By Andrew G. Biggs (American Enterprise Institute) The public-sector pension industry is claiming a comeback from losses suffered during the Great Recession. But this recovery is greatly exaggerated: even years past the end of the recession, most pension sponsors are unable to their full annual contributions, and pensions are taking as much investment risk as ever. The first step to effective pension reforms is an honest, accurate view of the costs and risks that public plans impose on government budgets...

Do Older Americans Have More Income Than We Think?

By Charles Adam Bee & Joshua W Mitchell (US Census Bureau) The Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement (CPS ASEC) is the source of the nation’s official household income and poverty statistics. In 2012, the CPS ASEC showed that median household income was $33,800 for householders aged 65 and over and the poverty rate was 9.1 percent for persons aged 65 and over. When we instead use an extensive array of administrative income records linked to the same...