October 2022

France’s Macron vows to implement contested pension changes

French President Emmanuel Macron vowed to implement contested pension reforms that would make younger generations work longer. In an interview Wednesday evening on France 2 television, Macron said the changes would start being applied next year. “There’s only one way to do it if we are lucid. Since we are living longer, it’s to work longer,” he said. Read also US. Early retirement took off during the pandemic The minimum retirement age to get full a pension would be gradually increased from 62...

US. Early retirement took off during the pandemic

Even as many Americans have returned to work over the past year, making up for most of the pandemic losses in the labor force, a sizable number of older workers are choosing to remain on the sidelines. In September, the share of people 55 and older who were working or looking for work was down 1.5 percentage points as compared with February 2020, according to the Labor Department. (For comparison, prime-age workers, or those 25 to 54 years old, are...

Bounded Rationality and Optimal Retirement Age

By Hyeon Park This paper explores a lifecycle model of labor supply and endogenous retirement behavior for households whose planning window is truncated and who will reoptimize as extra information on productivity is revealed over time. This short horizon model internalizes the restriction on rationality for temporal resource allocation and the labor supply is closely dependent on the degree of productivity changes in view. With the model, the endogenous retirement timing---the moment at which the marginal utility from the intended...

US. Rehiring Retirees And The Impact To Retirement Plans

The IRS had previously issued FAQs to explain the retirement plan rules of the CARES Act. The original guidance answered questions about expanded distribution options and favorable tax treatment for retirement distributions needed because of the impact of coronavirus. In October, the IRS expanded the FAQs to include guidance on retiree benefits. While these new answers by the IRS relate directly to pension plans, they might be useful in administering a 401(k) plan, too. An employer has a choice when...

September 2022

Swiss voters support increase in women’s retirement age

Swiss have voted in favor of the proposal by a narrow margin in a referendum. Another proposal, on imposing stricter regulations on livestock farming, failed to pass. Swiss voters accepted the government's pension reform plan by a narrow margin on Sunday. The plan would raise the retirement age for women from 64 to 65, brining it in line with the age for men. Read also Sustainable finance policy a ‘blind spot’ for European pension funds A concurrent vote on imposing stricter regulations in...

Ireland to increase state pension for those who work beyond 66

Ireland will offer anyone over 66 a higher state pension the longer they stay in work, sidestepping a recommendation by a government-appointed commission to gradually increase the retirement age to 68 to help fund the ageing population. Under the proposed flexible model agreed by ministers on Tuesday, people will have the option from 2024 to continue working up until the age of 70 in return for a higher pension for each additional year they work. The state pension currently stands at...

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...

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...

August 2022

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...

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...