June 2019

11Jun

Bank fraud in San Miguel de Allende: expats fight to regain US $40 million stolen through Ponzi scheme

In San Miguel de Allende, it is said foreigners live here either because they want to be forgotten, or because there’s no one left to remember them. This small-town alchemy of anonymity and forgettability laid the groundwork for an alleged decade-long Ponzi scheme estimated to have stolen US $40 million from more than 150 Banco Monex accounts belonging to United States, Canadian, British, European and Australian expatriates. While several local Mexicans were also embroiled in the bank fraud, the vast majority...

June 11, 2019
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May 2019

17May

Informality, Labor Regulation, and the Business Cycle

By Gustavo Leyva, Carlos Urrutia We analyze the joint impact of employment protection and informality on macroeconomic volatility and the propagation of shocks in emerging economies. For this, we propose a small open economy business cycle model with frictional labor markets, labor regulation, and an informal sector, modeled as self-employment. The model is calibrated to the Mexican economy, in particular to business cycle moments for employment and informality obtained from our own calculations with the ENOE survey for the...

May 17, 2019
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04May

Institutional Design of Pension Systems and Individual Behavior: How do Households Respond?

By Renata Herrerias (Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM) - Department of Business Administration), Guillermo Zamarripa (Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM)). Mexico introduced a Defined Contribution (DC) Pension System in 1997. We analyzed the behavior of affiliated workers under the institutional design of the reformed system. Before the reform, 75% of affiliated workers could receive a lifetime annuity upon retirement; we project that under the new rules only 30% of participants will be able to transform savings into...

May 4, 2019
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April 2019

29Apr

Social Security Coverage Around the World: The Case of China and Mexico

By Francisco Perez‐Arce (Åbo Akademi University - Economics & Statistics), María Prados (University of Southern California), Erik Meijer (University of Southern California; RAND Corporation), Jinkook Lee (University of Southern California - Center for Economic & Social Research; Program on Global Aging, Health & Policy, Center for Economic & Social Research; RAND Corporation) We describe the current state and recent trends in the landscape of social security programs in China, Mexico, and India. A common thread across these countries is the...

April 29, 2019
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16Apr

It’s on! Mexican Afores plot mutual fund foray

Nothing moves quickly in the world of pension reform. Just ask Mexico’s pension funds, whose patience has been pushed to the limits of late. After being granted access to foreign mutual funds for the first time in December 2017, Mexico’s pension funds had to wait over a year to receive guidelines from the local pensions authority, known as Consar, on how they could invest in them. A number of factors led to delays, not least among them last...

April 16, 2019
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March 2019

19Mar

Blackstone joins KKR and BlackRock in Mexico private equity fundraising

Blackstone Group has raised $695 million from Mexican pension funds for its first two local private equity funds, filings showed, joining Black Rock and KKR & Co in expanding in Mexico following regulatory changes. Several of the world’s top private equity managers have quietly raised billions of dollars from Mexican pension funds, known as afores, since new rules were enacted early last year, filings to the Mexican Stock Exchange and a non-public document reviewed by Reuters showed. Regulators have...

March 19, 2019
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15Mar

Impact of the digitalisation of financial services on supervisory practices in the private pension sector case study: Mexico

By the National Commission of the Retirement Savings System (CONSAR) I. Context of the Retirement Savings System (SAR) 1. Mexico introduced a new mandatory DC system of individual accounts in 1997 for private-sector workers (IMSS) and in 2007 for public-sector workers (ISSSTE)1 , both of which replaced old DB systems that had been in place since the 1940s and 1950s. 2. The new system has been relatively successful in creating a big pool of pension savings, as well as...

March 15, 2019
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03Mar

The Effect of Noncontributory Pensions on Saving in Mexico

By Catalina Amuedo-Dorantes (San Diego State University - Department of Economics; IZA Institute of Labor Economics), Laura Juarez (Bank of Mexico), Jorge Alonso Ortiz (Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM) - Centro de Investigacion Económica) This paper examines the effects of noncontributory pension programs at the federal and state levels on Mexican households' saving patterns using micro data from the Mexican Income and Expenditure Survey. We find that the federal program curtails saving among households whose oldest member is either...

March 3, 2019
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February 2019

02Feb

Using Behavioral Science to Increase Retirement Savings in Mexico A look at what we have learned over three years

By Andrew Fertig, Alissa Fishbane, Jaclyn Lefkowitz Acknowledgements We’ve been fortunate to work with many individuals who made this report possible. We are enormously grateful to MetLife Foundation for its support and partnership throughout our efforts, and especially to Evelyn Stark, Alison Jarrett, Gabriela Zapata, and Nalleli Garcia Gutierrez. We’d like to thank our team members Marcela Cheng Oviedo, David Munguía Gómez, and Juan David Robalino for their excellent research and design contributions as well as their dedication...

February 2, 2019
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January 2019

30Jan

Mexico. AMLO Plan to Unleash Pension Fund Investing Has Critics Worried

Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador’s plan to let Mexico’s giant pension funds invest in more diverse assets, including private equity funds, is sparking concern that the populist president will steer the funds toward his own pet infrastructure projects. "The worry is that this could be a way to finance projects of interest of the government, for which it lacks fiscal funds, but that are economically controversial," said Gustavo Rangel, the chief Latin America economist at ING Financial Markets LLC in...

January 30, 2019
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