February 2024
22Feb

Can ChatGPT Plan Your Retirement?: Generative AI and Financial Advice

By Andrew W. Lo & Jillian Ross We identify some of the most pressing issues facing the adoption of large language models (LLMs) in practical settings, and propose a research agenda to reach the next technological inflection point in generative AI. We focus on four challenges facing most LLM applications: domain-specific expertise, an ability to tailor that expertise to a user’s unique situation, trustworthiness and adherence to the user’s moral and ethical standards, and conformity to regulatory guidelines and...

February 22, 2024
Articles, Operation, Pension design, , ,
Read more...
16Feb

Does Pension Automatic Enrollment Increase Debt? Evidence from a Large-Scale Natural Experiment

By John Beshears, Matthew Blakstad, James J. Choi, Christopher Firth, John Gathergood, David Laibson, Richard Notley, Jesal D. Sheth, Will Sandbrook & Neil Stewart Does automatic enrollment into retirement saving increase household debt? We study the randomized roll-out of automatic enrollment pensions to ~160,000 employers in the United Kingdom with 2-29 employees. We find that the additional savings generated through automatic enrollment are partially offset by increases in unsecured debt. Over the first 41 months after enrollment, each additional month...

February 16, 2024
Articles, Operation, , ,
Read more...

February 2023
08Feb

Early Pension Withdrawals in Chile During the Pandemic

By Olga Fuentes, Olivia S. Mitchell & Félix Villatoro Chile, with one of the largest and best funded defined contribution programs in Latin America, held over USD $200 bn in assets at the onset of the Covid-19 crisis, or more than 80% of GDP. Reacting to populist pressures during the pandemic, however, the government gave non-retired participants three separate opportunities to tap into their retirement accounts, leaving some 4.2 million participants with zero retirement savings and draining around $50 bn...

February 8, 2023
Articles, Operation, Pension design, Savings, , , , ,
Read more...

June 2022
03Jun

Reporting on a Greener Future

By Maggie Williams As climate change and ESG stewardship become a central part of pension schemes’ investment strategy, identifying suitable performance measures and devising frameworks to report on them has also risen in importance. The Pensions Regulator and Department for Work and Pensions now requires schemes to use the Task Force on Climate-Related Disclosures framework (TCFD) to report on their portfolios – and from April 2022, large companies in the UK will also be subject to mandatory climate risk reporting, based...

June 3, 2022
Articles, Investment, Operation, Regulation, ,
Read more...

May 2021
13May

Have scale effects on cost margins of pension fund investment portfolios disappeared?

By Jacob Antoon Bikker, Jeroen Meringa Investment costs of pension funds are crucial for their returns. Consolidation in the pension fund market proceeds continuously, often with cost savings as the main argument. Unused economies of scale in the pension fund investment costs, however, have declined over the years to values close to zero, except for the very small pension funds. This paper investigates investment economies of scale in the Netherlands and pays special attention to the non-linear relationship between investment...

May 13, 2021
Articles, Operation, Pension design, System Sustainability, , ,
Read more...

January 2021

21Jan

Global Payments: And the Fintech Innovations Changing the Industry

By Carol Coye Benson Glenbrook’s “Global Payments” provides the go-to-answers to the big questions about global payments. In clear and lively writing, the author explains the common model behind national payments systems all over the world, what actually happens in a cross-border payment, and how fintech innovators are changing the industry. The book describes payments innovations in the rails, in the products and services, and new out-of-the-box alternatives. It explores real-time retail payments (aka Faster Payments) and how these...

January 21, 2021
Books, Innovation, Operation, , , ,
Read more...

January 2021
01Jan

Collecting and transferring pension contributions

By Rafael Rofman & Gustavo Demarco Collecting social security contributions is an important operational issue in all types of pension systems. Many regimes are plagued by poor compliance and weak, inefficient administration. Some countries have tried to introduce an automatic incentive to contribute by moving systems closer to"actuarial fairness,"where pension benefits are more strictly related to individual contributions. Examples include the systems of individual accounts introduced in a range of countries in Latin America and Eastern Europe. But in these...

January 1, 2021
Articles, Operation, Savings, ,
Read more...

April 2020
11Apr

Enlisting Employees In Improving Payroll-Tax Compliance: Evidence From Mexico

By Todd Kumler, Eric Verhoogen, Judith A. Frías A growing body of research suggests that difficulties in collecting taxes are an important constraint on economic performance in developing countries. Evidence from rich countries points to third- party reporting — in particular, employer reports of employees' wages — as a potential remedy. To what extent does the accuracy of third-party reporting carry over to developing countries, with their weaker enforcement regimes? In this paper, we compare two sources of wage information...

April 11, 2020
Articles, Labor Market, Operation, , ,
Read more...

December 2019

06Dec

Automatic enrolment: Qualitative research with small and micro employers

By Department for work & pensions Legislative changes set out in the Pensions Acts 2007, 2008 (and updated as part of the Pensions Act 2011 and 2014) aim to increase private pension saving in the UK and reverse a long-term decline in pension participation rates. The reforms require employers to automatically enrol eligible workers into a qualifying workplace pension scheme and to make a minimum contribution. These employer duties are being introduced between October 2012 and February 2018,...

December 6, 2019
Books, Operation,
Read more...

August 2019

05Aug

The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

Much of what will happen in the next thirty years is inevitable, driven by technological trends that are already in motion. In this fascinating, provocative new book, Kevin Kelly provides an optimistic road map for the future, showing how the coming changes in our lives--from virtual reality in the home to an on-demand economy to artificial intelligence embedded in everything we manufacture--can be understood as the result of a few long-term, accelerating forces. Kelly both describes these deep trends--interacting,...

August 5, 2019
Books, Operation, Pension design, System Sustainability, , ,
Read more...