September 2026
04Sep

Subjective Financial Literacy and Retirement Planning

By Weiqiang Tan & Jingbo Wu This research uses data from the National Financial Capability Study to investigate how subjective financial literacy (FL) influences retirement planning behaviors. Through a probit model, we establish that subjective FL have significant positive effects on three common retirement planning behaviors. When analyzing how subjective FL affects retirement planning, we find that retirement savings estimation partially mediates the relationship between subjective FL and the opening of retirement accounts. In addition, we find that the effect...

September 4, 2026
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04Sep

Redistribution through Taxes or Pensions? Optimal Income Tax and Pension Progressivity

By Burkhard Heer & Mark M. Trede We develop a medium-scale overlapping-generations model with endogenous labor supply and skill premium to study optimal income redistribution using progressive labor income taxes and pensions. The model is calibrated to the four countries USA, Great Britain, Italy and Germany which differ substantially in their tax and pension systems, demographics, and skill shares among workers. Optimal pension benefits are proportional to lifetime contributions in all four countries, while the optimal degree of income tax...

September 4, 2026
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August 2026
28Aug

Risk Sharing and Asset Pricing under Alternative Retirement Systems

By Li Wei We examine what happens to financial markets and how generations share risk when defined benefit (DB) pension plans are incorporated into an asset pricing model with imperfect markets. We look at how important it is for pension fund growth, changes in asset demand, and return-driven volatility channels to use an adjusted macroeconomic asset price model and past data on financial markets and the pension sector. We use scenario models to look at what would happen to the...

August 28, 2026
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21Aug

Lessons for Retirement Security from Well-Regulated Pensions

By Andrew G. Biggs The near disappearance of traditional defined benefit pensions is often treated as a loss for retirement security. This paper asks a different question: whether workers and employers value guaranteed pension benefits enough to bear their full economic cost. ERISA made private pensions more secure but also more expensive, after which traditional plans declined sharply. Meanwhile, workers with defined contribution accounts generally do not recreate DB features through higher saving, conservative portfolios, or annuitization. These patterns do...

August 21, 2026
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14Aug

Shadow Pensions: An Exploratory Field Study of Informal Old-Age Income Strategies Among Jakarta’s Unregistered Workforce

By Fajrin Andi Muhamad Pratama Indonesia's main old-age insurance program, BPJS Ketenagakerjaan, is built almost entirely around formal employment-yet three in five Indonesian workers are informal, and only a small fraction of them are ever enrolled. National statistics capture the size of that gap well; they say almost nothing about what people actually do instead. I spent three days in Jakarta interviewing market traders and ojek drivers to find out. The results were not quite what I expected going in....

August 14, 2026
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07Aug

Bequest-Motivated Decumulation of UK Pensions for Non-Domiciled Individuals: A Monte-Carlo and HJB Approach

By Sebastien Hitier We study the optimal decumulation of a UK pension pot for an expatriate holder who is tax-resident in a jurisdiction that does not tax investment income or gifts. Because the pension wrapper offers no ongoing tax shelter to heirs, the holder's sole objective is to minimise the expected present value of lifetime taxes-personal income tax on drawdowns plus inheritance tax at death. We formulate the problem as a stochastic optimal control with Gompertz-Makeham mortality, progressive UK taxation,...

August 7, 2026
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07Aug

Deaccumulation in India: The Role of Equity, Debt and Annuities in Retirement Income

By Ravi Saraogi & Pushpinder Singh Framework: We adopt a partial annuitisation framework in which a fraction of the retirement corpus is used to purchase an immediate life annuity, while the remainder is retained in a self-managed portfolio. Using a bootstrap Monte Carlo approach with Indian equity, debt and inflation data, we simulate retirement paths across four portfolio allocations, three annuitisation levels (0, 20 and 40 per cent) and four annuity payout rates (6, 7, 8 and 9 per cent)....

August 7, 2026
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July 2026
17Jul

Inclusive Pensions for an Aging World: Evidence and Strategies for Engaging Informal Workers

By Clément Joubert, Jessica Meckler, Simrin Makhija & Lili Vessereau This Working Paper reviews how different countries have designed pension schemes for informal workers. It focuses on contributory schemes for the “missing middle”: informal workers who have sufficiently stable incomes to save for old age but lack access to suitable pension options. The paper draws upon public documentation and literature on how to target and scale pension schemes for informal sector workers. The world is experiencing a demographic shift in which populations...

July 17, 2026
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17Jul

Extending Pension Coverage to the Informal Sector in Africa

By Melis Guven  The coverage of pension systems in the Africa region is limited to the small segment of the population in the formal sector. Coverage is thin partly because traditional contributory pension schemes are not responding to the needs of the informal sector. As a result, a large share of the region’s adult population has no access to contributory pension schemes during their working lives. This means they will not be eligible for a pension. It also means the...

July 17, 2026
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June 2026
26Jun

Avoiding the ‘pink pound’ blind spot

By Scottish Widows  While Pride celebrations carried on around the UK, the reality is that ‘pink finances’ remain in dire straits. It was a common trope not that long ago that this cohort of society was more likely to be more affluent than average. But the reality is very different. In fact, the challenges facing LGBTQ+ people are vast, and this group is much more likely to have a range of different vulnerabilities. To ensure that they continue to deliver the...

June 26, 2026
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