September 2022
09Sep

France’s biggest union warns Macron: Reforming pensions now would ‘set France on fire’

France’s biggest union has warned President Emmanuel Macron that reforming pensions at a time of high inflation and economic woes would “set France on fire.” In an interview with RTL radio on Thursday, Laurent Berger, the president of the French Democratic Confederation of Labour (CFDT), said the French people “are in a very tense moment, with a lot of anxiety.” “I tell the government and will also tell the president: To start pushing back the legal retirement age in a vertical...

September 9, 2022
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08Sep

Switzerland. Pensions vote: ‘the reform comes at the expense of women’

Vania Alleva, the boss of Switzerland’s largest trade union, says wage discrimination should be eliminated before women are made to work longer. She wants voters to say ‘no’ to a reform of the old-age pension system on September 25. The central plank of the reform is an increase in the retirement age for women from 64 to 65, putting them on an equal footing with men. Government, parliament, and parties from the right and centre all say this is a...

September 8, 2022
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August 2022
17Aug

This is how long people across Europe can expect to work

Whether you love your job—or dream of retirement—most of us want to know how long our working lives will last. The next generation of Europeans are expected to work for an average of 36 years, although there are big differences between countries. Working lives in Europe have been getting longer since 2001, according to the European Commission’s data service Eurostat. They shortened slightly for the first time in 2020 because of COVID-19, but are now up to their pre-pandemic level. The...

August 17, 2022
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11Aug

Labor Supply Flexibility and Portfolio Selection with Early Retirement Option

By Junkee Jeon & Jehan Oh In this paper, we study an optimal consumption and investment problem of an economic agent who can choose flexible labor supply and an option to early retire in the existence of mandatory retirement date. We model the agent's preference as the Cobb-Douglas utility, which is a function of consumption and leisure, and consider the agent's unit wage rate as a stochastic process. The optimization problem has a feature of combining both stochastic control and...

August 11, 2022
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July 2022
25Jul

This Is the Average Retirement Age in the U.S. — and Why It’s a Problem

Americans may be retiring too early for their own good. Many people aim to retire in their mid- to late 60s. But the average retirement age in the U.S. is considerably younger than that. According to recent Gallup data, the average reported retirement age is 61. Now on the one hand, that's up from age 57 back in 1991. But it's also a pretty young age to retire at. And those who go that route could end up struggling financially because...

July 25, 2022
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June 2022
30Jun

A Multi-State Model for Sick Leave and Its Impact on Partial Early Retirement Incentives: The Case of the Netherlands

By Sophie de Mol van Otterloo & Jennifer Alonso-García We investigate the effect of part time and full time work on health using a Markov framework and generalized linear models to smooth the resulting crude rates. The Chapman-Kolmogorov equations are used for a general solution. We apply this model to assess a partial early retirement incentive in the Netherlands, known as "the generation pact''. The smoothed rates imply that working part time does not necessarily mean a better health for...

June 30, 2022
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20Jun

UK. State pension age increase doubles poverty rate among pensioners

Nearly 100,000 65-year-olds fell into poverty as the state pension age rose from 65 to 66, depriving them of an income of £142 per week as the government saved £4.9bn. According to research by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) the latest increase in state pension age from 65 to 66 meant that the absolute income poverty rate for 65-year-olds rose by 14 percentage points, or nearly 100,000 people, to reach 24% by late 2020. The higher state pension age also...

June 20, 2022
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17Jun

Aussie aged pensioners call for opportunity to work more hours

A growing number of Aussie seniors still working after retirement age are calling for the opportunity to work more hours without being penalised for it. A group of pensioners have told A Current Affair they're willing to help fill Australia's labour void, but the problem is that if they work too many hours, it will affect their pension. "If I work an hour over my 30 hours a fortnight, it changes my pension quite a bit," dementia specialist and senior Betty...

June 17, 2022
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08Jun

France no longer sees raising retirement age to 65 as ‘a priority’

Pension reform, a key pledge from President Emmanuel Macron’s presidential election campaign, is no longer a major priority for the government, new Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne has said. Mr Macron had said multiple times that he planned to raise the pension age in France from 62 to 65 years, and said that the move would be one of the only ways to tackle the pension deficit. However, new PM Ms Borne has now said that it is no longer seen as...

June 8, 2022
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06Jun

People in Germany retired earlier with slightly higher pensions in 2021

For years, the average retirement age in Germany has been increasing, but 2021 saw a little blip in the trend, with employees retiring a little earlier and with slightly higher pension benefits than in previous years. People retired earlier with higher pensions in 2021 On average, people working in Germany retired a little earlier last year and with slightly higher pensions, according to new figures from the Deutsche Rentenversicherung, which were made available to Bild. In total, 1,435 million employees retired in...

June 6, 2022
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