July 2022
22Jul

New Evidence on the Demand for Advice within Retirement Plans

By Jonathan Reuter & David P. Richardson. We study demand for advice within defined contribution retirement plans offered by 23 institutions where TIAA is sole recordkeeper. Advice seeking increases with age, account balance, annual contribution level, web access, and changes in marital status. More provocatively, participants who invest solely through target date funds—the dominant default investment option—are significantly less likely to seek any form of advice throughout the age distribution, raising the possibility that reliance upon defaults crowds out advice...

July 22, 2022
Articles, Pension design, , ,
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22Jul

Myopic Savings Behaviour of Future Polish Pensioners

By Sonia Buchholtz, Jan Gaska & Marek Góra Low saving rates combined with low effective retirement age herald old-age poverty. This paper examines the preferred strategies of future Polish pensioners in order to sustain the standard of living in the future. A two-step approach is used: as a first-best strategy, we explore determinants of supplementary saving with binary logistic models; as a second-best strategy, we examine alternative options with principal component analysis. Future retirees rarely accumulate long-term savings, do not use...

July 22, 2022
Articles, Savings, , , ,
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15Jul

Seven Economic Facts About the U.S. Racial Wealth Gap

By Kristen Broady, Darlene Booth-Bell & Taylor Griffin Using data from the 2019 Survey of Consumer Finances and the U.S. Census Bureau, along with data and research from other sources, this paper presents seven economic facts about the racial wealth gap in the U.S. We present data on racial disparities in income, employment, homeownership, education, access to credit, and retirement savings – all factors that contribute to a significant and persistent gap in net worth between households of different races...

July 15, 2022
Articles, System Characterization, , ,
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15Jul

Old Age Pensions and Social Security Today: Need to Introduce ‘Time Bank’ for the Unmet Social Needs of the Elderly in Uganda

By Kibs Boaz Muhanguzi World over, many programs have been put in place to ensure reasonable welfare and relevance of the elderly senior citizens in the community. Out of these diverse programs, pensions and social security fund, and Social Assistance Grants for the Elderly (SAGE) are common. Of recent, the introduction of time banks; a non-financial, barter system of exchange, with the aim of ensuring access to the unmet social needs of the elderly people in the community has emerged....

July 15, 2022
Articles, System Characterization, , ,
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15Jul

The Unbearable Lightness of the Reform of the Pension System

By Hans van Meerten & Sanne Vlastuin In this article, Hans van Meerten (Professor of European Pension Law at Utrecht University) and Sanne Vlastuin (Master's Student in Private Law at Utrecht University) discuss the transition to a new Dutch pension system. In particular, they pay attention to European law aspects that could be problematic in this light, including the pension participant as consumer and the information gap of pension participants. More is needed to make the envisaged pension system EU-proof...

July 15, 2022
Articles, System Characterization, , ,
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08Jul

The Role of Longevity Annuities in Different Socioeconomic Classes: A Canadian Case Study

By Rui Zhou, Johnny Siu‐Hang Li & Kenneth Zhou A longevity annuity is a deeply deferred annuity which begins payments very late in life. By transferring some of the risk of outliving retirement savings at advanced ages to annuity providers, longevity annuities provide retirees with enhanced later-life financial security. This paper aims to investigate the impact of longevity annuity provision on retirement income planning for Canadians, on the basis of the tax rules and retirement system in Canada. The research...

July 8, 2022
Articles, Investing, Savings, , , ,
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08Jul

Measurement of ESG Performance: A Study of Indian Companies

By Preeti Sharma, Priyanka Pandey, Vijay Kumar Jain & R. C. Dangwal The present study aims to construct an inclusive, Literature-based, and statistically vetted environmental, social and corporate governance disclosure (ESGD) index, measure the item-wise, theme-wise, and factor-wise ESG performance of the top 80 Indian companies for the period 2013-2016, and examine item-wise, theme-wise and factor-wise variations in ESGD. Content analysis is used to measure the ESG disclosures of the sample companies. To test the variations, skewness, kurtosis, Levene’s, Chi-square,...

July 8, 2022
Articles, Sustainability, , ,
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June 2022
30Jun

A Multi-State Model for Sick Leave and Its Impact on Partial Early Retirement Incentives: The Case of the Netherlands

By Sophie de Mol van Otterloo & Jennifer Alonso-García We investigate the effect of part time and full time work on health using a Markov framework and generalized linear models to smooth the resulting crude rates. The Chapman-Kolmogorov equations are used for a general solution. We apply this model to assess a partial early retirement incentive in the Netherlands, known as "the generation pact''. The smoothed rates imply that working part time does not necessarily mean a better health for...

June 30, 2022
Articles, Pension design, ,
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30Jun

Spillover Effects of Old-Age Pension Across Generations: Family Labor Supply and Child Outcomes

By Katja Kaufmann, Yasemin Özdemir & Han Ye We study the impact of grandparental retirement decisions on family members' labor supply and child outcomes by exploiting a Dutch pension reform in a fuzzy Regression Discontinuity design. A one-hour increase in grandmothers' hours worked causes adult daughters with young children to work half an hour less. Daughters without children, with older children and sons/daughters-in-law are not affected. We show important long-run impacts on maternal labor supply and on the child penalty....

June 30, 2022
Articles, Labor Market, ,
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30Jun

Does Informality Hold the Key to Growth and Stability?

By Meghna Dutta This paper attempts to analyse the impact of a prevailing informal sector on the dynamics of growth and inflation in developing economies. The high growth rates posited by most developing economies in the presence of a huge informal sector suggest that this sector might not be the malefactor as often indicated. The main results show that the informal economy not only contributes to economic growth but the firms also help to significantly reduce inflation by generating employment...

June 30, 2022
Articles, Labor Market, ,
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