July 2018

16Jul

The Mommy Effect: Do Women Anticipate the Employment Effects of Motherhood?

By Ilyana Kuziemko, Jessica Pan, Jenny Shen, Ebonya Washington After decades of convergence, the gender gap in employment outcomes has recently plateaued in many rich countries, despite the fact that women have increased their investment in human capital over this period. We propose a hypothesis to reconcile these two trends: that when they are making key human capital decisions, women in modern cohorts underestimate the impact of motherhood on their future labor supply. Using an event-study framework, we show substantial...

July 16, 2018
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09Jul

Financial stability implications of a prolonged period of low interest rates

From  Committee on the Global Financial System The decade following the Great Financial Crisis (GFC) has been marked by historically low interest rates. An environment characterised by "low-for-long" interest rates may dampen the profitability and strength of financial firms and thus become a source of vulnerability for the financial system. In addition, low rates could change firms' incentives to take risks, which could engender additional financial sector vulnerabilities. This report identifies and provides evidence for the channels through which a "low-for-long"...

July 9, 2018
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06Jul

Demography and Provisions for Retirement: The Pension Composition, an Equilibrium Approach

By B.M.S. van Praag (University of Amsterdam) & J. Peter Hop (University of Amsterdam) Pensions may be provided for in a modern society by several methods, viz., voluntary individual savings, mandatory fully funded occupational pension systems, and mandatory social security financed by pay-as-you-go. The specific mixture of the three systems we will call the pension composition. We assume that individual workers decide about their own individual savings, that the fully funded occupational system is decided upon by the age cohort of...

July 6, 2018
Adequacy, Articles, Labor Market, Pension design, , , , ,
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June 2018

30Jun

Nigeria and the Development Quagmire: Prospects of Development through Agriculture, Food Security and Agro-Based Industrialization

By Tesky Timothy Agoben (University of Lagos, Faculty of Social Sciences, Department of Sociology ; Federal University, Ndufu-Alike, Ikwo) This paper focused on ‘The Prospects of Nigeria’s Development through Agriculture, National Food Security and Agro-Based Industrialization’. To effectively examined how these areas of the agricultural sector can serve as prospects for Nigeria’s development, the role of agriculture in a country’s development were highlighted and it was found out from previous agricultural and developmental journals that, agriculture has the potentials to...

June 30, 2018
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25Jun

The Impact of Pensions and Insurance on Global Yield Curves

By Robin M. Greenwood (Harvard Business School) & Annette Vissing-Jorgensen (National Bureau of Economic Research) We document a strong effect of pension and insurance company (P&I) assets on the long end of the yield curve. Using data from 26 countries, the yield spread between 30-year and 10-year government bond yields is negatively related to the ratio of pension assets (in funded and private pension and life insurance arrangements) to GDP, suggesting that preferred-habitat demand by the P&I sector for long-dated...

June 25, 2018
System Sustainability, ,
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16Jun

Wage Determination in the Long Run, Real Wage Resistance and Unemployment: Multivariate Analysis of Cointegrating Relations in 10 OECD Economies

By Timo Tyrväinen (Bank of Finland) Over the past twenty years or so, unemployment has been increasing in most OECD economies.In the same period, there has been a considerable increase in the wedge between the real cost to the employer of hiring a worker and the net real wage received by the worker.The present study examines whether changes in the wedge (including various tax rates) may have generated long-lasting effects on real labour costs.Behaviour which generates this kind of outcome...

June 16, 2018
Aging, Articles, Labor Market,
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16Jun

Population Aging and the Possibility of a Middle-Income Trap in Asia

By Joonkyung Ha (Hanyang University - Ansan Campus) & Sang-Hyop Lee (University of Hawaii - Department of Economics) We present three conditions for a demography-driven middle-income trap and show that many economies in East, South, and Southeast Asia satisfy all of them. The conditions are (1) support ratio—the ratio of workers to consumers—matters for economic growth, (2) economic development accompanies more investment in human capital and lower fertility due to the quantity–quality trade-off, and (3) current low level of fertility...

June 16, 2018
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16Jun

The Effects of Means-Tested, Noncontributory Pensions on Poverty and Well-Being: Evidence from the Chilean Pension Reforms

By Italo Garcia (RAND Corporation) & Andres Otero (Independent) Chile initiated in 1981 a privately managed, individual-account pension system that inspired similar reforms in many Latin American countries, and that has been considered as a possible model for Social Security in the United States. After 30 years in place, the Chilean pension system has been criticized for replicating existing inequalities in labor markets and increasing the risk of old-age poverty; for achieving lower levels of coverage; and for providing low...

June 16, 2018
Articles, Pension design, Regulation, , , , ,
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10Jun

Inheritances and Inequality across and within Generations

By Andrew Hood & Robert Joyce Today’s elderly have much more wealth to bequeath than their predecessors, primarily as the result of rising homeownership rates and rising house prices. At the same time, today’s young adults will find it harder to accumulate wealth of their own than previous generations did, due to the sharp fall in homeownership, the dramatic decline of defined benefit pensions in the private sector and the stagnation in household incomes. Together, these trends mean inherited wealth is...

June 10, 2018
Aging, Books, Labor Market, Savings, ,
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10Jun

Pension Markets in Focus

OECD Recent years have witnessed intense pension reform efforts in countries around the globe, often involving an increased use of funded pension programmes managed by the private sector. These funded arrangements are likely to play an increasingly important role in delivering retirement income in many countries and privately managed pension assets will play an increasing role in financial markets, notably as a source of long-term savings. This annual report, which now covers 85 countries, gives an overview of private pension systems worldwide and...

June 10, 2018
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