August 2025
29Aug

EU labour market – quarterly statistics

By European Union In Q1 2025, 197.9 million persons in the EU were employed. The EU seasonally adjusted employment rate for people aged 20-64 years stood at 76.1%, up from 76.0% in Q4 2024 as shown in Figure 1. For the same period, the seasonally adjusted total labour market slack in the EU, which is the unmet need for work, amounted to 23.6 million persons, which represented 10.9% of the extended labour force in Q1 2025, up from 10.8% in Q4 2024. Regarding its main component,...

August 29, 2025
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22Aug

The Causal Influence of Pension on the Participation of Older Workers in the Ghanaian Labour Market

By George Domfe, Kwadwo Opoku & Antoinette Tsiboe-Darko Population ageing has stirred up policy discourse on pension coverage in developing economies. While in most of these countries, a smaller proportion of older persons receive pensions in the form of regular payments from the state, a considerable proportion of them engage in active work to maintain their livelihood. These descriptions are typically true of Ghana. However, it remains unclear in the Ghanaian literature whether the absence of a pension is a...

August 22, 2025
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May 2025
30May

The Early Retirement Gap: Does Job Satisfaction Matter Less for the Self-Employed?

By Raquel Justo, Adrian Merida & Juan A. Sanchis-Llopis Understanding the drivers of early retirement is increasingly important in the context of aging populations and growing concerns over pension sustainability. While extensive research has examined the retirement behavior of paid employees, the self-employed, who operate under distinct work arrangements and institutional contexts, remain comparatively understudied. This work examines whether job satisfaction influences actual retirement behavior differently for self-employed individuals and paid employees. Leveraging longitudinal data from the Survey of Health, Ageing...

May 30, 2025
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April 2025
25Apr

Varying effects of public pensions: Pension spending and old-age employment under different pension regimes

By Kun Lee Socioeconomic consequences of pension reforms have often been discussed without careful consideration of institutional contexts, despite the fact that institutional designs of public pensions differ substantially across countries. This study argues that the outcomes of pension reforms vary depending on the institutional structure of public pensions, by showing that the associations between public pension spending and old-age employment rates of different socio-demographic groups vary across different institutional contexts. Using time-series cross-section data from 20 European countries and...

April 25, 2025
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16Apr

Retirement in the USA: The Outlook of the Workforce 25th Annual Transamerica Retirement Survey

By Transamerica Institute Retirement in the USA: The Outlook of the Workforce, a collaboration between Transamerica Center for Retirement Studies (TCRS) and Transamerica Institute, delves into the retirement prospects of the U.S. workforce including workers who are employed by others, self-employed workers, and workers who are unemployed but looking for work. Based on a survey of more than 6,100 members of the workforce, the report delves into their life priorities and outlook, personal finances, retirement expectations, and how they are saving,...

April 16, 2025
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11Apr

The Social Security Retirement Age

By Congressional Research Service The Social Security full retirement age (FRA) is the age at which workers can first claim full (i.e., unreduced) Social Security retired-worker benefits.1 Among other factors, the age at which an individual begins receiving Social Security benefits has an impact on the size of the monthly benefits. Claiming benefits before the FRA can substantially reduce monthly benefits, whereas claiming benefits after the FRA can lead to a substantial increase in monthly benefits. Benefit adjustments are made...

April 11, 2025
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11Apr

Optimal Investment-Consumption and Retirement Choice with Labor and Pension Incomes

By Hyun Jin Jang & Seon Hwa Lee This study examines lifetime optimal investment, consumption, and retirement timing decisions under a heterogeneous consumption utility function and the presence of pension earnings. Using the duality method, we derive the optimal wealth, investment-consumption strategies, and voluntary retirement region. Through simulation analysis, we assess the impact of pensions on these decisions. Our findings highlight the critical role of pensions in retirement planning, alongside wages and labor costs. Notably, pension benefits encourage earlier voluntary...

April 11, 2025
Articles, Corporate Governance, Diseño de Pensiones, Edad de Retiro, Envejecimiento Poblacional, Funding, Gobierno Corporativo, Inversión, Labor Market, Manejo de Pensiones, Mercado Laboral, Operaciones, PPI’s original Op-Eds, Regulación, Sostenibilidad, Sostenibilidad del Sistema, Suficiencia, Supervision, Sustainability, , ,
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04Apr

Robots and Informal Employment in China

By Haiyan Lin This paper examines labor adjustments between the informal and formal sectors in response to the adoption of industrial robots in China. Using a longitudinal household data from 2010 to 2018, I find that robotization increases informal employment. Quantitatively, one more robot per thousand workers increases the share of informal employment by 1.16 percentage points. The reallocation is not driven by new entrants or re-entrants, but by workers initially employed in the formal sector. Displaced formal workers tend...

April 4, 2025
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March 2025
21Mar

Minimum Wage Policy and the Gender Wage Gap

By Hang Anh Nguyen, Martin O'Brien & Alfredo Paloyo Minimum wage policies have become a nearly universal feature of modern labour markets, with over 90% of countries implementing statutory wage floors since 2012 (Del Carpio & Pabon, 2014). Yet, despite their widespread adoption, the economic effects of minimum wages remain highly contested. Advocates argue that they boost earnings for lowwage workers, reduce income inequality, and mitigate poverty, while critics contend that they suppress productivity, distort wage structures, and incentivise firms...

March 21, 2025
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07Mar

How and Why the Gender Pension Gap in Urban China Decreased between 1988 and 2018

By Björn Gustafsson, Peng Zhan & Hanrui Jia In urban China, gender gaps in employment and earnings have steadily increased since the 1990s. Such gender gaps are important because pension rights and amounts are based on labor force participation and wages. However, as this study demonstrates, despite the rise in gender differences in the urban labor market, the average gender pension gap decreased between 1988 and 2018. In this paper, we describe the evolution of the fragmented pension system in...

March 7, 2025
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