The importance of cross-border portability of social benefits is increasing in parallel with the rise in the absolute number of international migrants and their share of the world population, and perhaps more importantly, with the rising share of world population that for some part of their life...

In many policy areas it is essential to use the best estimates of life expectancy, but such estimates are vital to most areas of pension policy – from indexed access age and the calculation of initial benefits to the financial sustainability of pension schemes and the operation of their...

Nonfinancial defined contribution (NDC) pension schemes have been successfully implemented since the mid-1990s in a number of European countries such as Italy, Latvia, Norway, Poland, and Sweden. The NDC approach features the lifelong contribution-benefit link of a financial defined contribution...

After the global financial crisis and until 2021, the primary objective of central banks in advanced economies was to implement policies aimed at increasing inflation, given that inflation had been too low for too long. Having reached the effective lower bound (ELB) of nominal interest rates,...

With the capital markets union (CMU), the European Union embarked on one of its yet most ambitious and potentially most relevant reform projects. However, the huge potential for the European economy by a genuine CMU has not yet been realized. The key reason for this is that an important...

The room for maneuver of monetary policy and the relevance of the zero lower bound of nominal interest rates are largely determined by the level of and the outlook for the natural rate of interest (R*), i.e. the unobservable equilibrium interest rate that neither stimulates nor contracts the...