May 2023
15May

Germany. Retirement Workers: The Solution To The Skills Shortage?

Kurt Marx repairs and maintains heating systems. He started as an apprentice almost 50 years ago. Actually, he could soon retire free of deductions. However, the service technician plans to continue working. Not for financial reasons: he likes the daily challenge of finding technical errors, he says. Above all, Marx wants to keep in touch with people. And he knows how difficult it is for his boss to find staff. “I’m probably not the exception, after all, specialists are...

May 15, 2023
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12May

“The Great Retirement Boom”: The Pandemic-Era Surge in Retirements and Implications for Future Labor Force Participation

By Joshua Montes, Christopher L. Smith & Juliana Dajon As of October 2022, the retired share of the U.S. population was nearly 1-½ percentage points above its pre-pandemic level (after adjusting for updated population controls to the Current Population Survey), accounting for nearly all of the shortfall in the labor force participation rate. In this paper, we analyze the pandemic-era rise in retirements using a model that accounts for pre-pandemic trends in retirement, the cyclicality of retirement, and other factors....

May 12, 2023
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April 2023
18Apr

French President Macron says he hears people’s anger but insists pension change was needed

French President Emmanuel Macron said Monday that he heard people’s anger over raising the retirement age from 62 to 64, but insisted that it was needed to keep the pension system afloat as the population ages. In many cities, opponents to the pension law took to the streets to bang pots and pans during Macron’s televised address to the nation, with the rallying cry: “Macron won’t listen to us? We won’t listen to him!” In Paris, the gatherings quickly turned into...

April 18, 2023
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17Apr

Macron to address France after ‘Pyrrhic’ pensions victory

President Emmanuel Macron is on Monday to address France for the first time since signing into law his controversial pension reform, facing warnings the political and social crisis it sparked is not over. Macron signed the legislation early Saturday, just hours after the banner change to raise the retirement age from 62 to 64 had been validated by the constitutional court, prompting accusations he was smuggling the law through in the dead of night. After three months of protests and strikes,...

April 17, 2023
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14Apr

Constitutional Council approves Macron’s controversial French pension reform

The Constitutional Court, the country’s highest authority on constitutional matters, on Friday handed down its ruling on whether the pension reform – which among other things raises the pension age from 62 to 64 – was constitutional. As there is no appeal against court decisions, a refusal would have been a crushing blow for Macron’s government – but the court announced on Friday evening that the major parts of the reform were approved. The court also rejected a request for a...

April 14, 2023
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05Apr

Pension Reforms and Couples’ Labour Supply Decisions

By Hamed Markazi Moghadam, Patrick A. Puhani & Joanna Tyrowicz To determine how wives' and husbands' retirement options affect their spouses' (and their own) labour supply decisions, we exploit (early) retirement cutoffs by way of a regression discontinuity design. Several German pension reforms since the early 1990s have gradually raised women's retirement age from 60 to 65, but also increased ages for several early retirement pathways affecting both sexes. We use German Socio-Economic Panel data for a sample of couples...

April 5, 2023
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03Apr

Who spends the longest time in retirement?

This article was first published on 19 February 2020 and was updated on 29 March 2023. Retirement lengths vary by country. There are now more people over the age of 65 than there are under the age of five. The World Economic Forum says pension savings must be incentivized to ensure better retirement outcomes. There are now more people over the age of 65 than there are under the age of five, a World Economic Forum report has found. As a result, there are...

April 3, 2023
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March 2023
31Mar

Frames, Incentives, and Education: Effectiveness of Interventions to Delay Public Pension Claiming

By Franca Glenzer, Pierre-Carl Michaud & Stefan Staubli Many people forgo a higher stream of public pension income by claiming early. We provide both quasi-experimental and survey-experimental evidence that the timing of public pension claiming is relatively inelastic to changes in financial incentives in Canada. Using the survey experiment, we evaluate the effect of two different educational interventions and different ways of framing the incentive to delay claiming. While all three types of interventions induce delays, these interventions have heterogeneous...

March 31, 2023
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31Mar

The economic — and political — consequences of reforming France’s pensions

Earlier this month, French President Emmanuel Macron followed through on his long-touted promise to reform the country’s pension system, raising the retirement age from 62 to 64. How he did it though — essentially forcing the legislation through without a vote in the lower house of parliament — hit a nerve. Since then, over a million people have taken to the streets across France; social media has been filled with images of uncollected garbage piling on the streets of Paris...

March 31, 2023
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31Mar

UK confirms delay in lifting of state pension age to 68

The UK government has confirmed it will not bring forward a rise in the state pension age to 68, saying a review of the policy will be delayed until after the next general election. The state pension is at present 66 for men and women, rising to 67 from 2026. It had been due to gradually rise to 68 from 2037, under plans first announced by ministers in 2017. But Mel Stride, work and pensions secretary, told MPs on Thursday that...

March 31, 2023
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