June 2020

12Jun

South African Individual Retirement Savings: An Analysis of the Social Factors

By Gizelle Willows This study's primary aim is to determine whether members of a South African tertiary institution's retirement fund are en route to have sufficient retirement savings. Secondly, the results are analysed between different social factors namely: age, gender, race, education level, marital status, and cost of employment. Survey data and information received directly from the retirement fund were used as inputs in a customised model. This method was unique to this study, that is, it was able...

June 12, 2020
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12Jun

Emergency Funds in the Wake of the Coronavirus

By Margaret Ryznar The CARES Act targeting the economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic allows taxpayers to withdraw up to $100,000 from their retirement savings, such as section 401(k) plans, without the typical 10% penalty for early withdrawal. However, retirement accounts do not make for ideal emergency funds. This Article therefore advocates that future legislation should incentivize separate savings funds. Source: SSRN

June 12, 2020
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05Jun

Can Low Retirement Savings Be Rationalized?

By John B. Shoven, Sita Slavov, John G. Watson Simple presentations of the life cycle model often suggest a constant level of real consumption in retirement. Similarly, financial planners commonly suggest that people save for retirement in such a way as to enable them to maintain a level retirement standard of living equal to their standard of living while working. However, constant consumption with age is only optimal under the precise and unlikely condition that the subjective rate of...

June 5, 2020
Articles, Pension design, Savings, ,
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May 2020
29May

The Effect of Workplace Pensions on Household Saving: Evidence from a Natural Experiment in Taiwan

By Tzu‐Ting Yang Population aging causes financial imbalances in pay‐as‐you‐go public pension programs. To remedy this problem, while ensuring the adequacy of retirement savings for employees, many countries complement or substitute public pensions by regulating their workplace pensions. This article exploits a pension reform in Taiwan that has mandated, since 2005, that all private‐sector employers contribute at least 6 percent of an employee's monthly wage to an individual pension account. I use workers in the unaffected sectors as a...

May 29, 2020
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April 2020
03Apr

How People React to Pension Risk

By Nicolas Salamanca, Andries de Grip, Olaf Sleijpen We show that people exposed to greater pension risk are less likely to invest in risky assets. We exploit a reform that links people's future pension benefits to their pension funds' funding ratio—a measure of the fund's financial health—making funding ratios a fund-specific measure of pension risk. The effect of pension risk is stronger for people who are better informed about their pensions, for retirees and pension-age non-retirees, and for wealthier...

April 3, 2020
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March 2020

20Mar

Grouping Individual Investment Preferences in Retirement Savings: A Cluster Analysis of a USS Members Risk Attitude Survey

By David P. Blake, Mel Duffield, Ian Tonks, Alistair Haig, Dean Blower, Laura MacPhee Cluster analysis is used to identify homogeneous groups of members of USS in terms of risk attitudes. There are two distinct clusters of members in their 40s and 50s. One had previously ‘engaged’ with USS by making additional voluntary contributions. It typically had higher pay, longer tenure, less interest in ethical investing, lower risk capacity, a higher percentage of males, and a higher percentage of...

March 20, 2020
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13Mar

Public Health and Disasters: Health Emergency and Disaster Risk Management in Asia

By Emily Ying Yang Chan, Rajib Shaw This book presents the health emergency and disaster risk management (H-EDRM) research landscape, with examples from Asia. In recent years, the intersection of health and disaster risk reduction (DRR) has emerged as an important interdisciplinary field. In several landmark UN agreements adopted in 2015–2016, including the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015–2030, the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the Paris climate agreement, and the New Urban Agenda (Habitat III), health is...

March 13, 2020
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February 2020

22Feb

Financial incentives and retirement savings

By OECD Launched in 2014, this project is reviewing the cost effectiveness of tax and other financial incentives. It is assessing more efficient ways of using public money to increase savings for retirement, retirement income and replacement rates. The project is taking into account the distributional impact of various measures and will examine alternative means of encouraging saving in complementary private pension plans other than current tax advantages. The project addresses three key questions that interest policy makers: What the different fiscal...

February 22, 2020
Books, Books, Pension design, Savings, System Sustainability,
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07Feb

How Do Children Affect the Need to Save for Retirement?

By Andrew G. Biggs Children consume a substantial portion of a household’s income while living at home, but are usually financially independent by the time the parents reach retirement age. Relatively little attention has been paid to how children affect parents’ need to save for retirement. In this paper I use expenditure data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to construct life cycle expenditure patterns from households with children and childless households, comparing the two to gain insights...

February 7, 2020
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07Feb

Pensions and Household Savings: Cross-Country Heterogeneity in Europe

By Anna d’Addio, Muriel Roger, Frederique Savignac We address the question of whether the heterogeneity in savings is partly due to differences in pension wealth across individuals and across countries, using a European harmonised wealth survey (HFCS) combined with estimates of pension wealth (OECD). First, we find significant displacement effects of mandatory pension wealth on non-pension financial wealth at the mean, and a statistically significant crowd-out estimate on the probability of owning real estate property. Second, there is heterogeneity...

February 7, 2020
Articles, Pension design, Savings,
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