September 2026
25Sep

Natural Buyers? Pension Funds and Treasury Exposure

By Aleksandar Andonov, Kristy Jansen & Joshua D. Rauh Long-maturity Treasury issuance reduces government rollover risk but depends on investors with structural demand for duration. We examine whether U.S. public pension funds, a $7 trillion sector, provide such demand, as is often presumed given their liabilities. Using security-level holdings, we show that Treasuries account for only 6% of pension assets and that total Treasury exposure, including derivatives, has a maturity of 8.0 years, only 1.3 years longer than marketable Treasury...

September 25, 2026
Articles, Investment, , , ,
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25Sep

Two Measures, Opposite Trends: Remittance Receipt in Mexican Household Surveys, 2008-2026

Por Walter Guevara Household surveys that ask about private transfers rarely separate support sent from abroad from the broader category of economic support a household may receive. Mexico's National Survey of Occupation and Employment (ENOE) contains both items. This note documents that the two move in opposite directions over 2008-2026, and that the difference is large enough to change substantive conclusions. Among adults aged 50 to 70, receipt measured by the broad item rose from 19.0 percent in 2008 to...

September 25, 2026
Articles, System Characterization, , ,
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11Sep

What Drives Institutional Asset Allocation? Survey Evidence from Pension Fund Advisors

By Carolina Salva & Tim Alexander Kroencke We survey 28 leading Swiss pension fund consultants and asset managers to understand the factors and their ranking driving institutional asset allocation decisions. The risk tolerance of pension fund boards, target returns, and risk-free rates emerge as the most influential factors, while traditional portfolio theory predictors such as expected returns, volatility or individual risk aversion show limited practical relevance. Finally, we find that individual risk aversion of beneficiaries plays a limited role. Our...

September 11, 2026
Articles, Investment, ,
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11Sep

Redistribution through Taxes or Pensions? Optimal Income Tax and Pension Progressivity

By Burkhard Heer & Mark M. Trede We develop a medium-scale overlapping-generations model with endogenous labor supply and skill premium to study optimal income redistribution using progressive labor income taxes and pensions. The model is calibrated to the four countries USA, Great Britain, Italy and Germany which differ substantially in their tax and pension systems, demographics, and skill shares among workers. Optimal pension benefits are proportional to lifetime contributions in all four countries, while the optimal degree of income tax...

September 11, 2026
Articles, Pension design, , ,
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11Sep

Pensions and Turbulence: Automatic Adjustment, Risk, and Fairness in Long-Term Pension Design

By Peter A. Diamond Public pension systems are long-term social contracts operating under persistent economic, demographic, and political uncertainty. Periods of turbulence, marked by financial shocks, changes in longevity, and shifting labour markets, test the capacity of pension institutions to adapt while maintaining adequacy, equity, and legitimacy. Building on earlier joint work on pension economics and reform with Nicholas Barr, this chapter analyses the role of automatic and semi-automatic adjustment mechanisms in public pension design. Drawing on comparative experience from...

September 11, 2026
Articles, Pension design, , , , ,
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04Sep

Subjective Financial Literacy and Retirement Planning

By Weiqiang Tan & Jingbo Wu This research uses data from the National Financial Capability Study to investigate how subjective financial literacy (FL) influences retirement planning behaviors. Through a probit model, we establish that subjective FL have significant positive effects on three common retirement planning behaviors. When analyzing how subjective FL affects retirement planning, we find that retirement savings estimation partially mediates the relationship between subjective FL and the opening of retirement accounts. In addition, we find that the effect...

September 4, 2026
Articles, Pension design, , , ,
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04Sep

Redistribution through Taxes or Pensions? Optimal Income Tax and Pension Progressivity

By Burkhard Heer & Mark M. Trede We develop a medium-scale overlapping-generations model with endogenous labor supply and skill premium to study optimal income redistribution using progressive labor income taxes and pensions. The model is calibrated to the four countries USA, Great Britain, Italy and Germany which differ substantially in their tax and pension systems, demographics, and skill shares among workers. Optimal pension benefits are proportional to lifetime contributions in all four countries, while the optimal degree of income tax...

September 4, 2026
Articles, Pension design, , , , ,
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04Sep

Pensions from Capital: How Pension Funds in the United States, Japan and Europe Invest -and What Private Investors Can Learn from Them

By Roland Rupprechter This paper examines the pension funds of the large industrial countries — with more than USD 68 trillion between them, the heaviest group of investors in the world. It compares how funded retirement provision is organised in the United States, in Japan and in Europe: how state, occupational and private provision differ, who grants which tax advantages to whom and at what level, and why equity quotas diverge so widely across regions — from 25 per cent...

September 4, 2026
Articles, Pension Management, , , , , ,
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August 2026
28Aug

Risk Sharing and Asset Pricing under Alternative Retirement Systems

By Li Wei We examine what happens to financial markets and how generations share risk when defined benefit (DB) pension plans are incorporated into an asset pricing model with imperfect markets. We look at how important it is for pension fund growth, changes in asset demand, and return-driven volatility channels to use an adjusted macroeconomic asset price model and past data on financial markets and the pension sector. We use scenario models to look at what would happen to the...

August 28, 2026
Articles, Pension design, , ,
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28Aug

Healthy Longevity as Regenerative Capital: AI-Enabled Prevention, Senior Re-employment, and Climate Risk

By Jules SADEFO KAMDEM Population ageing and climate change jointly threaten the functional capacity that sustains autonomy, labour supply, productivity, and fiscal resilience. This paper develops a continuous- time, age-structured model in which healthy longevity is a regenerative form of human capital. Cohort health is exposed to biological depreciation, a standardised heat-stress state, diffusion risk, and marked compound-Poisson losses. Prevention, climate adaptation, education, and effectively accessible artificial intelligence can offset avoidable depreciation. AI is accumulated as a depreciating capital stock...

August 28, 2026
Aging, Articles, , ,
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