April 2026
17Apr

How Will AI Affect Financial Planning for Retirement?

By Luke Delorme  I recently attended a financial advisor conference focused on artificial intelligence. Drawing on what I learned, this post summarizes my thoughts on how AI may reshape financial planning for retirement savers. Spoiler alert: I think it has great potential to help both advisors and individuals. The first iteration of AI tools has already improved retirement planning. For example, forward-thinking advisors are currently using AI note-taking tools, which allow advisors to listen more closely to their clients without missing...

April 17, 2026
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17Apr

Opt-in or Opt-out? The Power of Defaults in Pension Enrollment Choices

By Tabea Bucher-Koenen, Luisa Wallossek & Joachim Winter Default settings strongly increase pension enrollment, especially when savings incentives are high and choices are complex. We show that the effect is weaker when incentives are low, options are simple, and opting out is easy. We study the nationwide introduction of auto-enrollment for lowincome employees in Germany's public pay-as-you-go pension system. We find that automatic enrollment raises participation by 23 percentage points, though most individuals actively opt out. Linking administrative and survey data...

April 17, 2026
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10Apr

Communicating for action: Rewriting the social security engagement

By ISSA Social security institutions are shifting from traditional outreach into establishing leveraging communication tools and approaches that drives action from individuals. Through multi-pronged strategies they are engaging with individuals and creating meaningful connections that empower people to understand their rights, navigate services confidently, build trust and actively engage with social protection systems. Empowering individuals to know about and claim social security benefits and services is as much a delivery challenge as it is a communication one. People may have limited...

April 10, 2026
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10Apr

Opt-in or Opt-out? The Power of Defaults in Pension Enrollment Choices

By Tabea Bucher-Koenen, Luisa Wallossek & Joachim K. Winter Default settings strongly increase pension enrollment, especially when savings incentives are high and choices are complex. We show that the effect is weaker when incentives are low, options are simple, and opting out is easy. We study the nationwide introduction of auto-enrollment for low-income employees in Germany's public pay-as-you-go pension system. We find that automatic enrollment raises participation by 23 percentage points, though most individuals actively opt out. Linking administrative and...

April 10, 2026
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March 2026
20Mar

Employee Satisfaction and Pension Shortfall Risk

By Annita Florou, Meng Li, Peter F. Pope & Nipat Puangjampa Defined benefit (DB) pension plans are important to employee welfare. However, they carry risk as they are subject to minimum funding requirements. We examine the effect of a relaxation in pension funding rules on employee satisfaction by exploiting the adoption of the Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act (MAP-21). We find that employees of DB firms are less satisfied with their firms and their senior managers, after...

March 20, 2026
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13Mar

Pension and Entrepreneurship: Evidence from Sweden’s Transition from Defined Benefit to Defined Contribution

By Ai Jun Hou, Di Cui, Mingfa Ding, Yikai Han & Xiaoyang Li Sweden's 1999 pension reform-which replaced a defined-benefit (DB) regime with a notional defined-contribution (DC) scheme-changed incentives in ways that affect employees' career choice over the life cycle. We use Swedish administrative data and a difference-indifferences approach to study the impact of this reform on entrepreneurship. We find that entrepreneurial entry increases more after the reform among cohorts with greater exposure to the new DC pension system. The...

March 13, 2026
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February 2026
27Feb

The modality of pension information matters: The effects of visualization and interactivity

By Kristjan Pulk, Kristian Pentus, Leonore Riitsalu, Leo Daniel Sipria, Robin Talisaar & Ene Tubelt A significant barrier to pension engagement is a lack of awareness about the pension system and contribution options. Pension information is often presented as complicated text, which can deter engagement. We test how different modalities of visual and interactive pension communication affect individuals’ subjective pension knowledge, assessment of pension sufficiency, information search, and pension decision intentions. We do so by conducting two experiments: an online experiment...

February 27, 2026
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27Feb

Fairness Views, Pension Benefits, and Heterogeneity in Life Expectancy

By Maria Chaykina Notional Defined Contribution (NDC) pension schemes convert accumulated pension wealth into an annuity, based on an average life expectancy at retirement. When longevity differs across social groups, a single conversion factor implies systematic transfers from shorter-lived to longer-lived individuals. This motivates proposals to differentiate benefits by socio-demographic characteristics related to life expectancy. We study whether such differentiation is perceived as fair using a survey experiment involving 3,004 Italian residents aged 18-66. Respondents completed an incentivised allocation task...

February 27, 2026
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20Feb

Retirement Under Policy Uncertainty

By Piera Bello, Vincenzo Galasso & Alessandro Izzo This paper examines how policy uncertainty influences retirement decisions. We develop a simple model in which individuals face a one-time choice between immediate retirement and continued employment until the statutory retirement age. In the absence of policy uncertainty, retirement decisions depend solely on the standard income–leisure trade-off. When future pension reforms are uncertain, however, individuals also take into account the perceived risk of increases in the retirement age or reductions in benefit...

February 20, 2026
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06Feb

Retirement Survey & Insights Report 2025. New Economics of Retirement: New Solutions Provide a Ray of Hope

By Goldman Sachs In our annual Retirement Survey & Insights Report, we are pleased to present findings that may challenge conventional wisdom about retirement preparedness in America. While many acknowledge the looming retirement crisis, the traditional advice to simply save more may fail to account for the complex and evolving realities faced by millions of Americans. This year’s report introduces the "new economics of retirement,” as we grapple with the question “does the retirement math still work?” The report illustrates how rising costs...

February 6, 2026
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