November 2023

Social Security Programs and Retirement around the World

By Axel Börsch-Supan & Courtney C. Coile This ninth phase of the International Social Security project, which studies the experiences of twelve developed countries, examines the effects of public pension reform on employment at older ages. In the past two decades, men’s labor force participation at older ages has increased, reversing a long-term pattern of decline; participation rates for older women have increased dramatically as well. While better health, more education, and changes in labor-supply behavior of married couples may...

Sustainability of pension schemes: Building a smooth automatic balance mechanism with an application to the us social security

By Frédéric Gannon, Florence Legros & Vincent Touzé We build a “smooth” automatic balancing mecanism (S-ABM) which would result from an optimal tradeoff between increasing the receipts and reducing the expenditures of a pension scheme. The S-ABM obtains from minimizing a sum of discounted quadratic loss function under the constraint of an intertemporal budget balance. One advantage of this model of “optimal” adjustment is its ability to analyse various configurations in terms of ABMs by controlling the adjustment pace. Notably, this S-ABM...

October 2023

Replacement Rates and the Retirement Crisis

By Andrew G. Biggs  In 2014, the annual Social Security Trustees Report removed measures of Social Security replacement rates, which represent Social Security retirement benefits as a percentage of pre-retirement earnings. The Trustees expressed concerns that the Social Security Administration’s (SSA) actuaries’ methodology produced results that differed meaningfully from other common approaches. In 2023, the Social Security Trustees returned replacement rates to the report, without changes to the SSA methodology or discussion of their decision. The SSA replacement rate methodology produces...

US. Social Security Will Not Provide Sufficient Retirement Income for Low-Wage Workers

Even with the benefit of Social Security checks, low-income workers fall considerably short of replacing their income in retirement, emphasizing a need for policymakers and plan sponsors to step in to help improve options, according to Vanguard’s newest research.   By providing wider access to workplace retirement plans and implementing features like automatic enrollment and “under-saver sweeps,” policymakers and plan sponsors have an opportunity to help low-income workers address this shortfall. Delaying retirement and liquidating home equity are also strategies to...

September 2023

The Labor Market Effects of Facilitating Social Security Contributions Under Part-Time Employment Contracts: Evidence from Colombia

By Brenda Samaniego de la Parra, Andrea Otero-Cortés & Leonardo Morales  We examine the impact of reducing rigidities caused by regulation on labor demand in a context with high informality. Using employer–employee matched administrative records and household survey data, we estimate the effects of a reform that eliminated a wedge in firms' regulatory costs of employing workers on different work schedules in Colombia, reducing the relative costs of formal parttime employment. We find that the reform increased the probability of entering...

The Demographic Outlook: 2022 to 2052

By Congressional Budget Office The size of the U.S. population, as well as its age and sex composition, affect the economy and the federal budget. For example, the size of the working-age population affects the number of people employed; likewise, the size of the population age 65 or older affects the number of beneficiaries of Social Security and other federal programs. The Congressional Budget Office projects the population in future years by projecting fertility, net immigration, and mortality. (In this report,...

August 2023

Future of Jobs Report 2023

By World Economy Forum  The past three years have been shaped by a challenging combination of health, economic and geopolitical volatility combined with growing social and environmental pressures. These accelerating transformations have and continue to reconfigure the world's labour markets and shape the demand for jobs and skills of tomorrow, driving divergent economic trajectories within and across countries, in developing and developed economies alike. The Fourth Industrial Revolution, changing worker and consumer expectations, and the urgent need for a green...

July 2023

Relationship between Social Security Programs and Elderly Employment in Japan

By Takashi Oshio, Satoshi Shimizutani & Akiko S. Oishi  This study examines how elderly employment is associated with social security programs and how it responds to recent reforms in Japan. To this end, we employed a rich and longitudinal dataset of middle-aged and older individuals collected between 2005 and 2018. By incorporating various factors related to social security incentives into a single index of implicit tax (ITAX), we confirmed that the index successfully captured the incentives and their changes incorporated...

Early Retirement Provision for Elderly Displaced Workers

By Herman Kruse & Andreas Steinvall Myhre This paper studies the economic effects on re-employment and program substitution behavior among elderly displaced workers who exogenously lose eligibility for their early retirement option. We use detailed Norwegian matched employer-employee data containing information on bankruptcy dates and individual income, wealth, pensions and social security benefits. As job displacement before a certain age cut-off results in the loss of eligibility for early retirement benefits between ages 62–67 years in Norway, we are able...

Jamaica. NIS a regressive use of public funds – IDB executive

Labour lead specialist at the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) Professor David Kaplan has described the National Insurance Scheme (NIS) as a “regressive use of public funds”. Kaplan was addressing the annual luncheon of the Pension Industry Association of Jamaica (PIAJ) at Hotel Four Seasons in St Andrew yesterday. Responding to a question, following his keynote address, Kaplan pointed to deficiencies in the system. “It does seem that there is an imbalance between what people are contributing to the system and what they...