August 2021
19Aug

On The Investment Strategies in Occupational Pension Plans

By Frank Bosserhoff, An Chen, Nils Sørensen, Mitja Stadje Demographic changes increase the necessity to base the pension system more and more on the second and the third pillar, namely the occupational and private pension plans; this paper deals with Target Date Funds (TDFs), which are a typical investment opportunity for occupational pension planners. TDFs are usually identified with a decreasing fraction of wealth invested in equity (a so-called glide path) as retirement comes closer, i.e., wealth is invested more...

August 19, 2021
Articles, Investment, , ,
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12Aug

Social Security Wealth, Inequality, and Life-cycle Saving: An Update

By John Sabelhaus, & Alice Henriques Volz Social Security wealth (SSW) is the present value of future benefits an individual will receive less the present value of future taxes they will pay. When an individual enters the labor force, they generally face a lifetime of taxes to pay before they will receive any benefits and, thus, their initial SSW is generally low or negative. As an individual works and pays into the system their SSW grows and generally peaks somewhere...

August 12, 2021
Articles, Pension design, , ,
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12Aug

Using Fresh Starts to Nudge Increased Retirement Savings

By John Beshears, Hengchen Dai, Katherine L. Milkman & Shlomo benartzi We conducted a field experiment to study the effect of framing future moments in time as new beginnings (or “fresh starts”). University employees (N=6,082) received mailings with an opportunity to choose between increasing their contributions to a savings plan immediately or at a specified future time point. Framing the future time point in relation to a fresh start date (e.g., the recipient’s birthday, the first day of spring) increased...

August 12, 2021
Articles, Pension design, Savings,
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12Aug

The Origins of ESG in Pensions: Strategies and Outcomes

By Stephanie Lachance, Judith C. Stroehle As intergenerational stewards of capital, pension funds can have many good reasons to embrace environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues in their investment practices. Yet the particular structure of pension funds creates both advantages and disadvantages for the integration of ESG. This paper reviews the historical origins, regulatory mandates, and fund structures of pensions, to tease out exactly which of these characteristics enable and which of them impede the inclusion of ESG at pension...

August 12, 2021
Articles, Investment, System Sustainability, ,
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06Aug

Death and Taxes: Why Longer Lives Cost Money

By Christopher Snowdon The British population is getting older. In 1948, life expectancy was 68. Thanks to healthier lifestyles and medical advances, it is now 81 and is expected to rise to 87 by the end of the next decade. The rapid growth of the elderly population will put a strain on healthcare, social care and welfare provision. The Office for Budget Responsibility predicts that health spending in the UK will rise from 6.2 per cent of GDP in 2019/20 to...

August 6, 2021
Aging, Articles, Pension design, ,
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06Aug

Thatcher: the Myth of Deregulation

By Philip Booth It is commonly believed that, during the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher presided over a substantial reduction in government regulation of financial services. Indeed, some have blamed this deregulation for the financial crash that took place nearly 30 years after 1979. ‘Big Bang’ in 1986 did remove the restrictive practices and largely private regulation that existed in securities markets. However, this involved the state unwinding systems of private regulation and was not, as such, a simple act of deregulation. Furthermore, not...

August 6, 2021
Articles, Regulation, , ,
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06Aug

Revisiting Retirement and Social Security Claiming Decisions

By Neha Bairoliya, Kathleen McKiernan Why do individuals retire and claim their Social Security benefits at the age they do? Understanding the key drivers of these decisions has been an important topic of research as it can help guide policy discussions on the impact of potential reforms to the Social Security program. We revisit this crucial question by exploring new sources of heterogeneity in these decisions as well as novel mechanisms governing these trade-offs. Using data from the Health and...

August 6, 2021
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July 2021
29Jul

The Informal Economy and Economic Growth of Russia

By Minhyeon Jeong The size of the Russian informal economy has attenuated since 2014. However, there are a host of workers involved in economic exercises in the informal sector, and a handful of industries seems to rely on the informal economy too-much intensively. This manuscript takes a brief look at several issues going around the concept of the informal economy, then overviews the Russian informal economy and foresees its growth implications. Source: SSRN 661 views

July 29, 2021
Articles, Labor Market, ,
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29Jul

Fair Pension Policies with Occupation-Specific Aging

By Volker Grossmann, Johannes Schünemann & Holger Strulik We discuss public pension systems in a multi-period overlapping generations model with gerontologically founded human aging and a special focus on occupation-specific morbidity and mortality. We examine how distinct replacement rates for white-collar and blue-collar workers and early retirement policies could be designed to provide a fair and aggregate welfare-enhancing public pension system. Calibrating the model to Germany, we find that a pension system that equalizes relative pension contributions and the relative...

July 29, 2021
Aging, Articles, Pension design, ,
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29Jul

Designing the Best Solution for Retirement

By Robert C. Merton In March 2020, Robert Powell, Retirement Management Journal editor-in-chief; Zvi Bodie, PhD, president of Bodie Associates and the Norman and Adele Barron Professor Emeritus of Management at Boston University; and Stacy Schaus, founder and chief executive officer of Schaus Group LLC, spoke with Merton about retirement solutions for the twenty-first century working and middle classes, fintech, and solving for the right problems. Source: SSRN 650 views

July 29, 2021
Articles, Pension design, ,
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