March 2017

17Mar

Amicus Brief of National Employment Lawyers Association in Advocate Health Care Network v. Stapleton

By Matthew C. Koski, Brian Wolfman (Georgetown University) & Wyatt Gregory Sassman (Charleston School of Law) The Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA) governs the conduct of employers that offer pensions and certain other benefits to their employees. In enacting the law, “Congress’s primary concern was with the mismanagement of funds accumulated to finance employee benefits and the failure to pay employees benefits from accumulated funds.” Gobeille v. Liberty Mut. Ins. Co., 136 S. Ct. 936, 946 (2016)...

March 17, 2017
Articles, Labor Market, Pension design, ,
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17Mar

Labor Force Participation in New England vs. The United States, 2007–2015: Why Was the Regional Decline More Moderate?

By Mary A. Burke (Federal Reserve Bank of Boston) This paper identifies the main forces that contributed to the decline in labor force participation in New England between 2007 and 2015, as well as the forces that moderated the region’s decline relative to that of the nation. This exercise contributes to an assessment of the outlook for participation in New England moving forward. Similar to previous findings pertaining to the United States as a whole, the single largest factor in...

March 17, 2017
Articles, Labor Market,
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14Mar

Personalized Information as a Tool to Improve Pension Savings: Results from a Randomized Control Trial in Chile

By Olga Fuentes; Jeanne Lafortune; Julio Riutort; José Tessada Félix Villatoro We randomly offer to workers in Chile personalized versus generalized information about their pension savings and forecasted pension income. Personalized information increased the probability and amounts of voluntary contributions after one year without crowding-out other forms of savings. Personalization appears to be very important: individuals who overestimated their pension at the time of the intervention saved more. Thus, a person’s inability to understand how the pension system affects them...

March 14, 2017
Articles, Labor Market, Savings, , , ,
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13Mar

Is There a Positive Incentive Effect from Privatizing Social Security: Evidence from Latin America

By Truman G. Packard (World Bank) There is increasing concern among policymakers that social security reforms that involve a transition to individual retirement savings accounts may exclude certain groups of workers from coverage against the risk of poverty in old age. While most public pay-as-you-go systems pool the risk of interrupted careers and periods of low earnings over the covered population, the reformed systems shift the burden of these risks to the individual. Adequate coverage under a system of individual...

March 13, 2017
Articles, Labor Market, Regulation, , ,
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10Mar

Does Financial Regulation Unintentionally Ignore Less Privileged Populations?

By Maya Haran Rosen & Orly Sade (Hebrew University) In 2014, the Israeli insurance and long term savings regulator reached out to the Israeli population to help individuals find inactive retirement plans and withdraw inactive funds. We find that the government's effort did not result in withdrawals of the majority of the accounts, and did not reach all subpopulations equally. Provident fund records indicate that those who took financial action and withdrew funds following the campaigns live in localities in...

March 10, 2017
Articles, Labor Market, Regulation, , ,
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08Mar

Problems of Reforming the Institute of Early Pensions for Work in Harmful and Hazardous Conditions

By Yury Mikhailovich Gorlin, Nadezhda Galieva, Elena E. Grishina, Marina A. Eliseeva, Vladimir Kartavtsev & Anna Cheremnykh (RANEPA) One of the main lines of the strategy for long-term development of the pension system of the Russian Federation, approved by the Resolution of the Russian Government is the reform of early retirement institute. In this area Russian Government set an additional tariff of insurance premiums for employers who offer hazardous work; a special assessment of the working conditions is being made,...

March 8, 2017
Articles, Labor Market, Pension design, Regulation,
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08Mar

Using Panel Tax Data to Examine the Transition to Retirement

By Peter J. Brady & Steven Bass (Investment Company Institute); Jessica Holland & Kevin Pierce (Government of the United States of America - Internal Revenue Service) Using panel data from the Internal Revenue Service’s Statistics of Income (SOI) Division, we find that most individuals do not experience a reduction in inflation-adjusted spendable income after claiming Social Security. We also examine the composition of income after claiming and find that both Social Security benefits and non-Social Security retirement distributions typically represent...

March 8, 2017
Articles, Labor Market, Pension design, ,
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February 2017

23Feb

Pensions, Retirement, and the Disutility of Labor: Bunching in Brazil

By Benjamin Thompson (University of Michigan) Abstract:      Elderly workers in developing countries face certain frictions, such as credit constraints, in their retirement decisions that may not be as common among their counterparts in the developed world, and these concerns may lead workers to work more or less than their preferred number of years. In this study, I firstly use regression discontinuity methods to show that a large fraction of urban male heads of households in Brazil (roughly 45%)...

February 23, 2017
Articles, Labor Market, Pension design, ,
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23Feb

Health, Health Insurance, and Retirement: A Survey

By Eric French & John Bailey Jones (Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond) Abstract:      The degree to which retirement decisions are driven by health is a key concern for both academics and policymakers. In this paper we survey the economic literature on the health-retirement link in developed countries. We describe the mechanisms through which health affects labor supply and discuss how they interact with public pensions and public health insurance. The historical evidence suggests that health is not the...

February 23, 2017
Aging, Labor Market, Pension design, ,
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05Feb

Employee Saving and Investment Decisions in Defined Contribution Pension Plans: Survey Evidence from the UK

By Alistair Byrne This paper uses data from a survey of the members of a UK defined contribution pension plan to explore the attitudes and knowledge of employees faced with pension saving and investment decisions. The results are consistent with behavioural economics in that many employees show limited interest in their pension arrangements. Not all members have received advice about their pension, but those who have are more likely to have calculated their savings needs, to have higher levels of...

February 5, 2017
Articles, Investing, Labor Market, Savings,
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