January 2022
06Jan

Did Pandemic Unemployment Benefits Reduce Employment? Evidence from Early State-Level Expirations in June 2021

By Harry J. Holzer, R. Glenn Hubbard & Michael R. Strain The generosity of Unemployment Insurance (UI) benefits was expanded during the pandemic (FPUC), along with the groups of workers eligible for benefits (PUA). These two programs were set to expire in September 2021, but 18 states opted out of both in June 2021. Using Current Population Survey data, we present difference-in-difference and event study estimates that the flow of unemployed workers into employment increased by around two-thirds following early...

January 6, 2022
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December 2021
23Dec

Pension Reform and Labor Supply

By Andrew C. Johnston & Jonah Rockoff As unfunded pension liabilities mount, governments experiment with ways to curb the costs of pensions. We examine the effect of one such reform on the retention and productivity of public-sector workers. The reform reduced pension annuities and increased penalties for early retirement, projected to save 8 percent of revenues. We use the fact that the reform only applied to workers below age and experience cutoffs to estimate the effect of the reform. We...

December 23, 2021
Articles, Labor Market, Pension design,
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17Dec

Pension Information and Women’s Awareness

By Paola Profeta, Marta Angelici, Daniela Del Boca, Maria Christina Rossi, Noemi Oggero & Claudia Villosio We explore the role of financial and pension information in increasing women’s knowledge and awareness of their future pension status and interest for pension information. We interview a representative sample of 801 Italian working women to assess their knowledge about pensions, financial issues and their own savings. The responses show that their knowledge and awareness of retirement planning is limited. We then run a...

December 17, 2021
Articles, Labor Market, Pension design, ,
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03Dec

Old-Age Pensions and Female Labour Supply in India

By Vidhya of Unnikrishnan & Kunal Sen Whether cash transfers have unintended behavioural effects on the recipient household’s labour supply is of considerable policy interest. We examine the impact’ of the Indira Gandhi National Old-Age Pension Scheme (IGNOAPS) on prime-age women’s labour supply decisions in India, where female labour force participation continues to decline over time. We use propensity score matching (PSM) to make households with IGNOAPS recipients comparable with program non-recipients. Further, we use individual fixed effects (FE) to...

December 3, 2021
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November 2021
26Nov

Population Aging and Worklife Duration: Myths and Realities in the Canadian Context

By Gilbert M., Yves Carrière & Marcel Mérette Population ageing is raising concerns about labour shortage and public finance sustainability, on the assumption that increased age-based dependency ratio is a synonym of shrinking working lifespan for financing expanding lifespan consumption. However, such assumptions usually omit an appropriate account of changing labour force participation and hours worked (behavioural components) which could be playing toward or against the tides of populating ageing (structural components). This paper estimates worklife duration in Canada between...

November 26, 2021
Aging, Articles, Labor Market, ,
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13Nov

How Will COVID-19 Affect Pensions for Noncovered Workers?

By Jean-Pierre Aubry, Kevin Wandrei, Laura Quinby Federal law allows certain state and local government employees to be excluded from Social Security if they are covered by an employer pension of sufficient generosity. As a result, approximately one-quarter of state and local workers are not covered by Social Security on their current job. Before COVID-19, these “FICA replacement plans” all satisfied the letter of the law in terms of providing benefits of sufficient generosity. This study has three aims. The...

November 13, 2021
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05Nov

The Future of Jobs Report 2020

By World Economic Forum The Future of Jobs report maps the jobs and skills of the future, tracking the pace of change. It aims to shed light on the pandemic-related disruptions in 2020, contextualized within a longer history of economic cycles and the expected outlook for technology adoption, jobs and skills in the next five years. Get the book here 602 views

November 5, 2021
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05Nov

The Skill-Specific Automatability of Aging Workers and Retirement Decisions

By Zeewan Lee Much of the discourse on the impact of automation on labor supply tends to assess the labor force as a whole, thereby disregarding the marginal effect on aging workers. In lights of the growing technological changes, we assess the linkage between the automatability of workers and retirement timing. Based on the theoretical model of task-based technological changes and drawing data from the Health and Retirement Study and O*NET, we create an Automatability Index based on workers’ primary...

November 5, 2021
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October 2021
29Oct

The Long Shadow The Long Shadow of Informality Edited by Challenges and Policies

By Franziska Ohnsorge and Shu Yu In emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs), far too many people and small enterprises operate outside the line of sight of governments—in a zone where little help is available to them in an emergency such as the COVID-19 crisis. This “informal” sector constitutes more than 70 percent of total employment in these countries and roughly one-third of output. Policy makers have long had good reasons to worry about this sector: Its participants are vulnerable even...

October 29, 2021
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29Oct

World Employment and Social Outlook Trends 2021

By ILO The pandemic has brought unprecedented disruption that – absent concerted policy efforts – will scar the social and employment landscape for years to come The COVID-19 pandemic has caused unparalleled disruption worldwide through its devastating impact on public health, employment and livelihoods. Governments and workers’ and employers’ organizations everywhere have taken immediate measures to tackle the crisis, preserve jobs and protect incomes, though these measures have differed in scope and generosity. While such measures have been crucial in mitigating...

October 29, 2021
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