This book provides a comprehensive appraisal of social security in Japan, where traditionally the burden of welfare provision has been the main responsibility of the family and employers, rather than the state. However, an ageing population, changes in family structure and continued recession...

Economic theory predicts that employer-provided retiree health insurance (RHI) benefits have a crowd-out effect on household wealth accumulation, not dissimilar to the effects reported elsewhere for employer pensions, Social Security, and Medicare. Nevertheless, we are unaware of any similar...

This book explores how rising pension and healthcare costs, along with workforce aging, are affecting pension and retirement planning around the world. Many middle-aged workers now realize that they will have to work longer than intended, as they begin to recognize that their retirement...

Retirement risk management must be dramatically overhauled if workers and retirees are to better prepare themselves to meet future retirement challenges. Recent economic events including the global financial crisis have upended expectations about what pension and endowment fund managers can do....

Using data from the Japanese Basic Survey on Wage Structure for 1981 and 1986, the authors estimate the effect of the age of mandatory retirement on the rate of growth of earnings with job tenure in Japan. The results indicate that an increase in the age of mandatory retirement reduces the rate...

To help workers navigate the transition from work to retirement more effectively, employers have been launching phased retirement programs, which allow older employees to work part-time and receive full retirement benefits. This paper examines the experience of the phased retirement system for...