October 2026
16Oct

When Retirement Faces Climate Risks: Linking Socio-Economic Pathways with Financial Outcomes

By Stephanie Neal & Laurens Swinkels Standard analyses of retirement adequacy focus on financial metrics such as contribution rates and replacement ratios, while climate scenario studies typically emphasize broad macroeconomic outcomes. Neither approach, however, directly addresses what matters most to individuals: the quality of life in retirement. Retirement security under climate change is inherently multidimensional, shaped not only by financial wealth but also by health systems, infrastructure, environmental conditions, and social resilience. We develop an integrated framework that combines qualitative...

October 16, 2026
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September 2026
11Sep

WTW 2026 Defined Contribution Survey: Employers face a retirement readiness gap, and pressure is mounting to prove plans work

By WTW  U.S. employers are facing a clear retirement readiness challenge: they value defined contribution (DC) plans, but many still lack a precise view of whether those plans are helping employees retire on time and with confidence. That is according to the WTW 2026 Defined Contribution Survey from WTW (NASDAQ: WTW), a leading global advisory, broking and solutions company. In the survey of 547 U.S. plan sponsors, 60% have a working definition of retirement readiness, split among income replacement (40%),...

September 11, 2026
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11Sep

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 11, 2026
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11Sep

Pensions and Turbulence: Automatic Adjustment, Risk, and Fairness in Long-Term Pension Design

By Peter A. Diamond Public pension systems are long-term social contracts operating under persistent economic, demographic, and political uncertainty. Periods of turbulence, marked by financial shocks, changes in longevity, and shifting labour markets, test the capacity of pension institutions to adapt while maintaining adequacy, equity, and legitimacy. Building on earlier joint work on pension economics and reform with Nicholas Barr, this chapter analyses the role of automatic and semi-automatic adjustment mechanisms in public pension design. Drawing on comparative experience from...

September 11, 2026
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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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