Blacks, Hispanics, and divorced women have historically experienced double-digit poverty rates in retirement, and divorce and other demographic trends will increase their representation in future retiree populations. For these reasons, we might expect an increase in the proportion of...

For decades, policymakers have discussed how to remedy the high poverty rates of older widows. Yet older divorced women are more likely to be poor than older widows, and historical divorce and remarriage trends suggest that in the future a larger share of retired women will be divorced. This...

This Note uses the latest version of the Social Security Administration's Modeling Income in the Near Term microsimulation model to updated earlier projections of Social Security retirement benefits for married women. Changes in women's earnings in the late twentieth and early twenty-first...

The Greek pension system has been costly, complex, and distortive, which has contributed to Greece’s fiscal problems and discouraged labor force participation. Several attempts to reform the system faltered due to lack of implementation, pushback by vested interests, and court rulings leading...

Americans are rapidly losing their pensions — replaced by savings plans disguised as retirement plans.Many sponsors view defined contribution (DC) plans as the best option for retaining some of the features of a pension plan without bearing all of the costs and risks of DB. This paper explores...

Collectively, Americans are woefully unprepared financially for retirement. This retirement problem actually reflects a collection of diverse issues. This paper identifies the most important ones: longevity; access; contributions; portability; behavioral mistakes; funded status; expenses; and...

A model is presented that explains the mix between funded and unfunded pension systems. It turns out that total pension and the relative shares of the two systems may be explained and are determined by the population growth rate, technological growth, the time-preference discount rate, the...

Norwegian administrative data are used to evaluate the impact of a doubling of the threshold in the retirement earnings test. We find almost no impact on the extensive margin, but a positive effect on the intensive margin. This positive effect is uneven over the earnings distribution, and...

Rapid population ageing and economic transformation in Asia raise the policy challenge of ensuring income security in old age. There is growing interest among policymakers in the potential role of noncontributory transfers as an instrument to address a variety of policy challenges, including old...

Old-age income support is becoming an issue of growing importance throughout Asia. This is especially true in East and Southeast Asia where the population is aging. This paper provides a broad overview of the current state of pension systems in the People's Republic of China, Indonesia, Republic...