June 2017

06Jun

Smart Pension, the provider of auto-enrolment pensions, nabs £15Mn to expand overseas

London-based Smart Pension has secured £15 million in Series B funding from Stensrud family, the owner of Norwegian asset manager Skagen. This round also saw participation from existing investors, Tom Valentine, co-founder of Secret Escapes and renowned entrepreneur William Reeve. The funding brings the total funds raised by the firm to £25 million at a valuation of £65 million. First reported by Sky News, Smart Pension will utilize funds to enable acceleration of the platform’s technological development. This, it believes,...

June 6, 2017
News
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06Jun

Assessing the Demand for Micropensions Among India's Poor

By Olivia S. Mitchell (University of Pennsylvania) & Anita Mukherjee (University of Wisconsin) Using new data from a field experiment in India, we test hypotheses about micropension design in a poor population. We elicit demand for the basic micropension in addition to variants with different minimum withdrawal ages, government match rates, and options for lump sum withdrawal. A majority (80%) of respondents report interest in the micropension, and the amount they are willing to contribute would be enough to cover...

June 6, 2017
Articles, Pension design, Savings, ,
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06Jun

Assessing the Demand for Micropensions Among India’s Poor

By Olivia S. Mitchell (University of Pennsylvania) & Anita Mukherjee (University of Wisconsin) Using new data from a field experiment in India, we test hypotheses about micropension design in a poor population. We elicit demand for the basic micropension in addition to variants with different minimum withdrawal ages, government match rates, and options for lump sum withdrawal. A majority (80%) of respondents report interest in the micropension, and the amount they are willing to contribute would be enough to cover...

June 6, 2017
Articles, Pension design, Savings, ,
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05Jun

México. Aportaciones para el retiro no aumentarán este sexenio: SHCP

Durante el actual sexenio ya no se logrará incrementar las aportaciones de 6.5% para mejorar las pensiones de los trabajadores, reconoció Óscar Vela, titular de la Unidad de Seguros, Pensiones y Seguridad Social de la Secretaría de Hacienda y Crédito Público. Ante este escenario, dijo que se seguirán impulsando las campañas para fomentar el ahorro voluntario. El objetivo principal a través de estas campañas es lograr que las empresas estén obligadas a ofrecer a sus trabajadores planes de ahorro voluntario,...

June 5, 2017
Noticias
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05Jun

Chile. Reforma de pensiones permitirá que AFP cobren en bloque deudas previsionales

La superintendencia de Pensiones está afinando la modificación a la norma que permita agilizar el proceso de cobranza de las cotizaciones no pagadas que constituyen deuda previsional, tarea que por mandato legal deben ejercer hoy las Administradoras de Fondos de Pensiones, AFP El ajuste normativo, forma parte de los cambios que incorpora la Reforma Previsional del gobierno, en cuya redacción esta trabajado el organismo regulador, encabezado por Osvaldo Macías. Según precisó éste mismo en un reciente seminario, el cambio permitirá...

June 5, 2017
Noticias
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05Jun

Americans Care More About Vacations Than Retirement

It's no secret that Americans are woefully ill-equipped for retirement. In a newly released study by COUNTRY Financial, 51% of workers admit that they don't factor retirement into their long-term financial goals. These findings are consistent with data from the Economic Policy Institute, which finds that almost 50% of Americans have absolutely no money saved for retirement. Now, it's one thing to neglect retirement savings out of necessity: Families living paycheck to paycheck often need every cent they bring home...

June 5, 2017
News
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05Jun

Fjarde AP Fonden Fourth Swedish National Pension Fund cuts its stake in oil and gas

Fjarde AP Fonden Fourth Swedish National Pension Fund cut its stake in EQT Co. (NYSE:EQT) by 7.6% during the first quarter, according to its most recent disclosure with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The institutional investor owned 27,867 shares of the oil and gas producer’s stock after selling 2,278 shares during the period. Fjarde AP Fonden Fourth Swedish National Pension Fund’s holdings in EQT were worth $1,703,000 as of its most recent SEC filing. Several other large investors have also...

June 5, 2017
News
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04Jun

Modeling Multi-State Health Transitions in China: A Generalized Linear Model with Time Trends

By Katja Hanewald, Han Li & Adam Wenqiang Shao (University of New South Wales) Rapid population aging in China has urged the need to understand health transitions of older Chinese to assist the development of social security programs and financial products aimed at funding long-term care. In this paper, we develop a new flexible approach to modeling health transitions in a multi-state Markov model that allows for age effects, time trends and age-time interactions. The model is implemented in the...

June 4, 2017
Aging, Articles, Labor Market
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04Jun

Long-Run Biological Interest Rate for Pay-as-You-Go Pensions in Advanced and Developing Countries

By Masahiro Nozaki (International Monetary Fund) How much of an internal rate of return would a sustainable pay-as-you-go pension system offer current and future generations equally? The answer is the sum of the Long-Run Biological Interest Rates (LBIR), the real-world equivalent of Samuelson's (1958) biological interest rate, and future productivity growth. Reflecting global population ageing, the median LBIR across 172 countries is as low as 1 percent per year. The LBIRs are particularly low in advanced countries, estimated to be...

June 4, 2017
Aging, Articles, Labor Market, Pension design, ,
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04Jun

Annuities and Retirement Income Planning

By Patrick J. Collins (Schultz Collins) This CFA Institute Research Foundation brief provides a broad-brush survey of the US annuity marketplace as of the end of 2014. It is a short and generic introduction to currently available annuity contracts. It is oriented toward both investors who are contemplating the use of annuities to generate income and hedge longevity risk and their advisers. It does not discuss the literature that evaluates annuities as instruments to enhance utility in the context of...

June 4, 2017
Aging, Articles, Investing,
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