August 2025

Reforming the Pension System in Nepal: Sustainability, Adequacy, and Coverage

By Dilip Raj Paudel Pension systems ensure financial security during retirement, especially in developing countries like Nepal. The sustainability, adequacy, and coverage of pension systems are critical for ensuring social security after retirement, particularly in developing countries like Nepal. This study provides a comprehensive analysis of Nepal's pension framework, examining contributory and non-contributory schemes to identify their strengths, limitations, and areas for reform. Utilizing a mixed-method approach, primary data from 384 respondents and secondary sources, including reports from international organizations,...

Economic and Distributional Effects of Demographic Shifts: Evaluating Pay-as-You-Go and Fully Funded Pension Schemes Based on the Greek Experience

By Zois Gerasimos Katsimigas & Christos Papatheodorou This paper examines economic and distributional consequences of demographic shifts by comparing pay-as-you-go (PAYG) and fully funded (FF) pension schemes in a macroeconomic framework, using Greece as a case study. Facing acute ageing and population decline, Greece provides a unique context to assess the performance of these schemes. We develop a post-Keynesian stock-flow consistent (SFC) model calibrated to the Greek economy to simulate the macroeconomic and distributional outcomes of both schemes under projected...

Boosting Retirement Income through Dynamic Withdrawals

By Ravi Saraogi Dynamic withdrawal strategies, extensively researched internationally, remain underexplored in India. This paper bridges this significant research gap by rigorously evaluating popular dynamic withdrawal methods using Indian data. Employing simulations based on historical equity, debt and inflation data from the Indian market, we compare 10 different adaptive and dynamic withdrawal strategies. The study demonstrates that dynamic strategies can improve withdrawals and sustainability compared to static withdrawal methods. However, this improvement comes at a significant cost of volatility in...

July 2025

Unintended Consequences: How Scaling Back Public Pensions Puts Government Revenues at Risk

By National Conference on Public Employee Retirement Systems The argument that taxpayers cannot afford public pensions has gained traction despite a woeful lack of empirical evidence to support it. Legislators across the nation are contemplating options for the future funding of public-sector worker retirement benefits at a time when competition for finite state and local resources is fierce. The reasons are familiar: the lingering effects of recession and misguided budget priorities have taken a toll. Time and again, defined-benefit pensions...

Developing Retirement Living Standards

By Matt Padley & Claire Shepherd The Retirement Living Standards (RLS), first published in 2019 and funded by the Pensions and Lifetime Savings Association (PLSA), set out what the public agree is needed to retire at two living standards above a minimum standard of living, based on extensive research with members of the public. The research uses the established approach to defining minimum living standards pioneered at CRSP and describes in detail what the public agree single and partnered retirees...

Individuals’ challenges managing pensions through retirement

By Bee Boileau, Jonathan Cribb & Carl Emmerson This report is one of two reports on the management of pension wealth in retirement conducted as part of the Pensions Review, led by the Institute for Fiscal Studies in partnership with the abrdn Financial Fairness Trust. In this report, we examine the decisions that older individuals face as they draw on and manage their private pension wealth through retirement. In particular, we highlight the growing importance of defined contribution (DC) wealth,...

June 2025

LGBTQ+ Aging and Retirement Issues: A Critical Review of Current Studies and Knowledge Gaps

By Julie Duda, Bri Bloxsom & Manshreya Grover This paper presents a detailed review of select studies on the experiences and challenges faced by LGBTQ+ older adults, particularly in the context of aging and retirement. Through a systematic analysis of fourteen studies, this review aims to provide a nuanced understanding of the issues encountered by this population, highlighting key themes including discrimination, healthcare access, social support, resilience, end-of-life preparation, and mental health. There exists a broad body of scholarly work that has shed light on...

Optimal Income Redistribution

By Pavel Brendler, Eva Carceles-Poveda & Arpad Abraham We study whether a redesign of the social security and income tax-and-transfer systems can deliver significant welfare gains. Our rich quantitative model features both realistic inequality over the life-cycle and the key main channels through which redistributive policies can distort aggregate allocations. We find that there are two distinct ways to achieve significant welfare gains with joint policy reforms. The first prioritizes reducing distortions through a regressive pension system, resulting in higher...

Flexible Retirement and Optimal Taxation

By Abdoulaye Ndiaye & Zhixiu Yu Raising the retirement age is a common policy response when social security schemes face fiscal pressures. We develop and estimate a dynamic life cycle model to study optimal retirement and tax policy when individuals face health shocks and income risk and make endogenous retirement decisions. The model incorporates key features of Social Security, Medicare, income taxation, and savings incentives and distinguishes three channels through which health affects retirement: nonconvexities in labor supply due to...

The Future of Financial Inclusion: Fintech, Microfinance, and Alternative Banking Models

By Selina Zhan Financial literacy refers to the ability to make informed financial decisions through acquiring relevant knowledge and skills such as investing, budgeting, and asset management. Individual financial literacy is crucial as many governments around the world are unreliable when it comes to providing adequate and stable financial support to their civilians. Additionally, as institutions become more and more exclusive with their increasingly complex products, the need for financial literacy grows, especially as the cost of retirement rises each...