August 2022

Labor Supply Flexibility and Portfolio Selection with Early Retirement Option

By Junkee Jeon & Jehan Oh In this paper, we study an optimal consumption and investment problem of an economic agent who can choose flexible labor supply and an option to early retire in the existence of mandatory retirement date. We model the agent's preference as the Cobb-Douglas utility, which is a function of consumption and leisure, and consider the agent's unit wage rate as a stochastic process. The optimization problem has a feature of combining both stochastic control and...

July 2022

Gender Pay Gap Report 2021: Reporting our progress

By Legal and General In 2021, we have once again seen a continued, progressive narrowing of our pay gap, from 26.6% to 24.1%. This progress reflects the focus we have applied over the past year to creating a more diverse workforce and a more inclusive workplace where everyone can succeed. In this report, we share our latest gender pay gap data and update stakeholders on the steps we’re taking to narrow the gap further. Monitoring and reporting the gap over...

Wait Your Turn: Pension Incentives, Workplace Rules and Labor Supply Among Philadelphia Municipal Workers

By David McCarthy & Po Lin Wang Little academic work has examined the labor supply response to pension incentives at the intensive margin. We explore this issue using individual-level administrative and pension data for Philadelphia city employees, where workers have some choice about whether or not to perform overtime, which is pensionable. We document large variation across workers in the incentives to do overtime provided by pension rules. Although standard regressions show that worker overtime is positively associated with own...

June 2022

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....

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...

The Gender Pensions Gap Report 2022 … and how to close it

By Joanne Segars OBE & Samantha Gould  Lower incomes throughout a woman’s working life will invariably impact their pension savings, creating an obvious pension gap. Furthermore, women who take time away from work to have children or for other caring responsibilities contribute to the widening gulf that we see between men and women’s pension wealth. Three million women are effectively “locked out” of workplace pension saving because they do not meet the £10,000 auto enrolment eligibility criteria. We are on a mission...

LGBTQ and Finance

By Sanjukta Brahma, Konstantinos Gavriilidis, Vasileios Kallinterakis, Thanos Verousis & Mengyu Zhang Recent changes in workplace and corporate board diversity policies and a series of court rulings have signalled a fundamental change in the treatment of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (henceforth LGBTQ) people in the corporate world. In this paper, we survey the burgeoning literature on the role of sexual orientation in finance. We show that LGBTQ-friendly policies affect organizational outcomes and enhance the quality of corporate governance....

Gay, gray, black, and blue: An examination of some of the challenges faced by older LGBTQ people of color

By Seon Kum Few studies exist that highlight the life experiences of the older LGBTQ person of color. This cohort faces unique challenges in life that have not been explored or investigated extensively, if at all. Older LGBTQ people of color have experienced discrimination based on race, gender, and sexuality in all phases of their lives, often bearing witness to and helping to start various equal rights and social justice movements. In addition to the unique challenges that come with...

Priorities for social security. Trends, challenges and solutions

By Issa The International Social Security Association (ISSA) draws its value, strength and dynamism from a global membership of national institutions that administer the main social security programmes of their countries. This gives the Association a unique and privileged vantage point from which to analyse key policy issues and emerging challenges in social security, and the many innovative responses and creative solutions to these. For its 2020–2022 Programme and Budget, the ISSA defined four priority areas to be addressed during the...

May 2022

Labor Migration in Asia. COVID-19 Impacts, Challenges, and Policy Responses

By ADBI Institute, OECD & ILO International migration is a difficult megatrend to predict. Yesterday, the COVID-19 pandemic; today, the Ukrainian refugee crisis; these have had and will have unpredictable long-lasting impacts on the international cross-border movements of tourists and migrant workers. After two years of a global pandemic, the world is still in the midst of a disruption of migration patterns. The cascade of border closures and the wild swings in economic activity upended predictions about labor migration. Deployment...