January 2023
18Jan

A Behaviorally Informed Financial Education Program for the Financially Vulnerable: Design and Effectiveness

By Ernst-Jan de Bruijn, Gerrit Antonides & Tamara Madern Financially vulnerable consumers are often associated with suboptimal financial behaviors. Evaluated financial education programs so far show difficulties to effectively reach this target population. In our attempt to solve this problem, we built a behaviorally informed financial education program incorporating insights from both motivational and behavioral change theories. In a quasi-experimental field study among Dutch financially vulnerable people, we compared this program with both a control group and a traditional program group....

January 18, 2023
Articles, Pension design, ,
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18Jan

Choosing Pension Fund Investment Consultants

By Aleksandar Andonov, Matteo Bonetti & Irina Stefanescu Pension funds rely on the advisory services of investment consultants for asset allocation decisions, manager selection, and performance benchmarking. While prior research finds that consultants generally do not add value, pension funds have increased the number of consultants over time, particularly in alternative assets, such as real assets, private equity and hedge funds. We explore the factors underlying the hiring and firing of consultants and examine whether these decisions are made in the...

January 18, 2023
Articles, Pension Management,
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13Jan

The Effect of Required Minimum Distributions on Intergenerational Transfers

By: Jonathan M. Leganza How do households use retirement savings accounts in retirement? The answer to this question is important for tax policy pertaining to retirement savings. I shed light on this question by studying how households respond to Required Minimum Distribution (RMD) regulations, which mandate withdrawals from retirement accounts upon reaching a specified age. Using data from the Health and Retirement Study and a regression discontinuity design, I estimate the causal effects of aging into RMD regulations. First, I...

January 13, 2023
Articles, Savings, ,
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13Jan

Long-Term Real Dynamic Investment Planning

By Russell J. Gerrard, Munir Hiabu, Jens Perch Nielsen & Peter Vodička When long-term savers plan for retirement they need to know their investment prospects in terms of real income (Merton, 2014). While inflation has traditionally been considered as a complication in financial analysis and financial practise, we obtain enhanced predictability and model fit if the real returns are targeted in conjunction with earnings-by-price minus inflation as predictor. For this latter case, we propose an investment strategy of updating the...

January 13, 2023
Articles, Investment, ,
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13Jan

Secure Act 2.0: A Missed Opportunity to Enhance Retirement Equity

By Albert Feuer SECURE Act 2.0, which was enacted on December 29, 2022, represents a missed opportunity to enhance retirement equity. The Act’s 92 provisions provide small new tax incentives to those American workers struggling to save for a comfortable retirement, larger tax incentives to those with few retirement concerns, more complex retirement tax rules, and weaken compliance rules that are primarily applicable to those with few retirement concerns. Source @Papers

January 13, 2023
Articles, Regulation, , ,
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06Jan

Standardized, Unitized, Accretive Longevity Insurance: Lessons from the Differing Demand for Annuities and Life Insurance

By Andrew Stumpff Morrison The historic U.S. shift from defined-benefit to defined-contribution employer-sponsored retirement plans has produced, among other things, a reduction in sharing of the risk of outliving one’s retirement savings. Commercial annuity contracts are available to insure this risk, but despite efforts to encourage their acquisition, few people own them. Close comparison with another life-cycle risk – that addressed by life insurance, which is more widely purchased by consumers – highlights as a probable reason for this low...

January 6, 2023
Articles, Pension design, , , ,
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06Jan

Optimal Retirement with Disability Pensions

By Hans Fehr & Adrian Fröhlich This paper develops a general equilibrium life-cycle model with endogenous retirement and disability risk, in order to quantify the impact of recent pension reforms in Germany. At certain ages households may either apply for disability pensions (DP) or old-age pensions (OAP), de-pending on eligibility rules and the generosity of the two programs. Our policy analysis focus on the increase in the normal retirement age (NRA) from age 65 to 67 (Reform 2007) and the recent...

January 6, 2023
Articles, Pension design,
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06Jan

The Effect of Pension Wealth on Employment

By Sebastian Becker, Hermann Buslei, Johannes Geyer & Peter Haan This study provides novel evidence about the pension wealth elasticity of employment. For the identification we exploit reform-induced variation of pension wealth that is related to the number of children but which does not affect the implicit tax rate of employment. We use a difference-in-differences estimator based on administrative data from the German pension insurance and find that, on average, the negative employment effect of pension wealth is significant and economically...

January 6, 2023
Articles, Pension design, , ,
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December 2022

Turn the Ship: The Moral Imperative and Legal Authority to Protect Retirees with Defaulted Student Loans from Social Security Offset
21Dec

Turn the Ship: The Moral Imperative and Legal Authority to Protect Retirees with Defaulted Student Loans from Social Security Offset

By: Johnson Tyler The U.S. Department of Education (ED) is not powerless when it comes to debt collection or defaulted borrowers. It both has the moral imperative and legal authority to stop seizing Social Security benefits from elderly (62+) borrowers in default. An underutilized law allows an agency to exempt an entire class of debtors from Treasury Offset, the debt collection process that leads to the reduction of Social Security payments. This paper explains the history of offset; why recent...

December 21, 2022
Articles, System Characterization, ,
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Inferring Occupation Arduousness from Poor Health Beyond the Age of 50
21Dec

Inferring Occupation Arduousness from Poor Health Beyond the Age of 50

By: Vincent Vandenberghe In the absence of a direct description of occupation arduousness, this paper shows how it can be inferred from poor health beyond the age of 50. Using retrospective lifetime data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) including the respondents’ professional career described with ISCO 2-digit, this paper finds a statistically significant link between many occupations and the risk of poor health beyond the age of 50. Next, we quantify the relative contribution...

December 21, 2022
Aging, Articles, Labor Market, , ,
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