October 2026

Brazil’s Demographic Transition and the Future of Social Protection: Rethinking Pension Policy for an Ageing Society

By Valter Manuel Gomes Neto Brazil's rapid demographic transition presents growing challenges for the sustainability, coverage, and adequacy of its pension system. Although the 2019 pension reform improved fiscal sustainability, population ageing and persistent labour informality continue to place pressure on pension financing and old-age income security. Drawing on existing research and policy evidence, this policy brief examines the trade-offs between fiscal consolidation, contributory coverage, and non-contributory income protection. It argues that future pension reform should move beyond a predominantly...

Workforce Turnover and Retention in the Public Sector: Insights from Public Pension Plans

By Barbara Butrica & Dan Doonan Workforce turnover has implications for employees and employers. On the employee side, turnover can involve lost wages and benefits. On the employer side, turnover can involve the loss of experienced employees as well as the investments made in training them. It also generates additional costs associated with recruiting and training replacement workers. Understanding the timing of turnover and how retention evolves over employees’ careers is important for economic security, workforce planning, public service delivery,...

August 2026

The Global Transition – The Impact of Demographics and AI on Economic Power

By Seth Benzell, Laurence J. Kotlikoff & Victor Yifan Ye This study deploys a multi-region, dynamic life-cycle, general equilibrium model to assess demography’s impact, through the course of this century, on global development. Our model’s 17 regions encompass more than 150 countries comprising 99% of the world’s population. Output is produced with three labor skill groups and internationally-mobile capital, with each country deciding annually whether to adopt its frontier automation technology. Our model features region-specific fiscal policy, TFP growth, and...

Job displacement and the health of older adults: Evidence from China

By Xiaoyun Zhang & Yiyang Luo This paper investigates the long-term consequences of involuntary job displacement on multidimensional health outcomes among middle-aged and older adults in urban China, using the 2014 China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Survey (CHARLS) Life History Questionnaire. To address the endogeneity of job loss, we exploit business closures, position cancellations, and layoffs during the state-owned enterprises (SOEs) reforms in the late 1990s as exogenous labor market shocks and employ Propensity Score Matching (PSM) to control for...

The Effect of Regularization Policies for Migrants on the Labor Market

By Puren Demirel This study reviews the labor-market effects of policies aimed at regularizing irregular migrants, with particular emphasis on amnesty programs and access to legal employment. Drawing on the existing literature and country experiences, it examines the mechanisms through which regularization may affect migrants, local workers, employers, and the broader economy. The analysis highlights that the effects of regularization depend strongly on host-country characteristics, including the size of the informal economy, labor-market structure, welfare arrangements, inspection capacity, and geographical...

July 2026

Pension Income and Post-Retirement Labor Supply

By Fabian Kindermann, Carla Krolage, Sebastian Kunz, Manuel Pannier & Karoline Ströhlein This paper provides causal evidence on how pension income affects labor supply after retirement. We exploit the introduction of the German Earned Income Pension Credit (Grundrente), which permanently increased pension income for retirees with long contribution histories and comparatively low lifetime earnings. The reform generates exogenous variation in non-labor income without creating additional labor supply distortions, allowing us to isolate pure income effects. Using administrative data covering the...

June 2026

How does private pension saving change for workers moving from employee jobs into self-employment?

By Jonathan Cribb & Laurence O'Brien Self-employed workers make up a significant part of the UK workforce, with over one-in-eight workers in self-employment. However, there are long-standing concerns about low levels of pension saving among this group: only 20% of working-age self-employed workers were saving in a private pension in 2022–23, compared with around 80% of employees (Department for Work and Pensions, 2025a). The trends in pension participation differ markedly between the two groups. In the late 1990s, almost 50%...

LGBTQ+ Labor Market Outcomes

By Travis Campbell & Yana Van Der Meulen Rodgers The emerging field of LGBTQ+ economics has convincingly demonstrated that LGBTQ+ individuals face distinct labor market disparities. This chapter provides an overview of their unfavorable labor market outcomes and then focuses on several specific issues for transgender workers. Previous studies show that gender-affirming care can improve mental health, whereas conversion therapy, which denies an individual's gender identity, damages mental health. An unexplored question is whether these mental health effects extend to...

May 2026

Old and new welfare states retaining older workers in the face of crisis: the case of COVID-19 in Europe

By Kun Lee The Coronavirus pandemic was a unique crisis in Europe as an unprecedented health and labour market shock barely disrupted long-term trends towards active ageing. We study the role of social policy responses and pre-existing welfare state institutions in moderating older workers’ early exit following the crisis. Using a cross-nationally harmonized panel survey in Europe, we examine whether variations in national labour market policies and pension institutions explain older workers’ exit outcomes following COVID-19, net of the economic...

Informality, Gender and Aging. Cumulative Inequalities and Intergenerational Effects

By Haut Comissariat Au Plan Since 2021, His Majesty King Mohammed VI’s High Guidance on social development has driven a structural project to extend social protection, focusing on the expansion of mandatory health coverage, the gradual integration of self-employed workers into pension schemes, and the introduction of universal family allowances. The New Development Model sets out this vision by establishing objectives in terms of decent employment, the economic inclusion of women, and intergenerational sustainability. The analysis presented in this report examines, in...