November 2019

28Nov

Pensions at a Glance 2019

By OECD The 2019 edition of Pensions at a Glance highlights the pension reforms undertaken by OECD countries over the last two years. Moreover, two special chapters focus on non-standard work and pensions in OECD countries, take stock of different approaches to organising pensions for non-standard workers in the OECD, discuss why non-standard work raises pension issues and suggest how pension settings could be improved. This edition also updates information on the key features of pension provision in OECD countries and...

November 28, 2019
Aging, Articles, Books, Labor Market, Pension design, Reports, Slider-Left, Sustainability, ,
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22Nov

How Would 401(K) ‘Rothification’ Alter Saving, Retirement Security, and Inequality?

By Vanya Horneff, Raimond Maurer, Olivia S. Mitchell The US has long incentivized retirement saving in 401(k) and similar retirement accounts by permitting workers to defer taxes on contributions, levying them instead when retirees withdraw funds in retirement. This paper develops a dynamic life cycle model to show how and whether ‘Rothification’ – that is, taxing 401(k) contributions rather than payouts – would alter household saving, investment, and Social Security claiming patterns. We show that these changes differ importantly...

November 22, 2019
Articles, Pension design, Savings, ,
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22Nov

Calibrating Gompertz in Reverse: Mortality-adjusted (Biological) Ages around the World

By Moshe A. Milevsky This paper develops a statistical and methodological framework for inverting the Gompertz-Makeham (GM) law of mortality for heterogenous populations in a manner consistent with a compensation law of mortality (CLaM), to formally define a global mortality-adjusted (biological) age. It implements and calibrates this framework using rates from the Human Mortality Database (HMD) to illustrate its salience and applicability. Among other things, this paper demonstrates that when properly benchmarked, the global mortality-adjusted (biological) age of a...

November 22, 2019
Aging, Articles, ,
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22Nov

Fiscal Incidence in Moldova: A Commitment to Equity Analysis

By Alexandru Cojocaru, Mikhail Matytsin, Valeriu Prohnitchi This paper uses methods developed by the Commitment to Equity Institute and data from the Household Budget Survey to assess the effects of government taxation and social spending on poverty and inequality in Moldova. The paper presents the first detailed distributional analysis of the tax and expenditure sides of the fiscal system, examining in particular the contribution of different taxes and transfers to poverty and inequality reduction in Moldova, as well as...

November 22, 2019
Adequacy, Articles, Pension design, , , ,
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15Nov

How Best to Annuitize Defined Contribution Assets?

Alicia H. Munnell, Gal Wettstein, Wenliang Hou Unlike defined benefit pensions that provide participants with steady benefits for as long as they live, 401(k) plans and Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs) provide little guidance on how to turn accumulated assets into income. As a result, retirees have to decide how much to withdraw each year and face the risk of either spending too quickly and outliving their resources or spending too conservatively and consuming too little. Surveys of individuals’ plans...

November 15, 2019
Articles, Investing, Savings,
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15Nov

Fiscal Incidence in Moldova: A Commitment to Equity Analysis

By Alexandru Cojocaru, Mikhail Matytsin, Valeriu Prohnitchi T his paper uses methods developed by the Commitment to Equity Institute and data from the Household Budget Survey to assess the effects of government taxation and social spending on poverty and inequality in Moldova. The paper presents the first detailed distributional analysis of the tax and expenditure sides of the fiscal system, examining in particular the contribution of different taxes and transfers to poverty and inequality reduction in Moldova, as well as...

November 15, 2019
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15Nov

Social Pensions and Market Values: A Conflict?

By Quentin Detienne, Elmar Schmidt Social occupational pension schemes, i.e. compulsory pension schemes that are the result of collective bargaining, fulfil an important social function. At the same time, they seem to conflict with some fundamental single market tenets, such as the European Union (EU) Single Market’s four fundamental freedoms and competition law principles. In this respect, occupational pension schemes in the Member States seem to embody the inherent tensions contained within the EU’s social market economy: a clash...

November 15, 2019
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08Nov

Sharpening the Teeth of EU Social Fundamental Rights? The Case of State Pension Age in the UK

By Hans van Meerten In this contribution I want to discuss an important and very topical EU Law element of the judgment regarding two claimants (Delve and Glynn), backed by BackTo60, versus the UK Department of Work and Pensions (hereafter: Delve and Glynn). Claimants argued inter alia that the UK State Pension Age (SPA)was discriminatory. I want to focus here not if SPA is discriminatory, but whether the (SPA) falls in the ambit of EU law. Didn’t the UK...

November 8, 2019
Articles, Regulation, System Sustainability, , ,
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08Nov

Robert C. Merton and the Science of Finance

By Zvi Bodie Starting with his 1970 doctoral dissertation and continuing to today, Robert C. Merton has revolutionized the theory and practice of finance. In 1997 Merton shared a Nobel Prize in Economics “for a new method to determine the value of derivatives.” His contributions to the science of finance, however, go far beyond that. In this essay I describe Merton’s main contributions. They include the following: 1. The introduction of continuous-time stochastic models (the Ito calculus) to the theory...

November 8, 2019
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08Nov

A Two-Step Mixed Pension System: How to Reinvent Social Security with the Help of Notional Accounts and Term Annuities

By Inmaculada Domínguez-Fabián,Pierre Devolder, Francisco del Olmo García, Jose A Herce The change in economic and sociodemographic reality, characterized by a continuous increase in longevity, the consequences of the economic crisis, and the lack of adequate adjustments of social security retirement pension systems everywhere, entails risks for workers and the social security systems themselves. Many reforms of public pension systems have been carried out in recent years, based on modifying system parameters and structural changes. Some reforms aim at...

November 8, 2019
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