This paper investigates the impacts of defined-benefit (DB) pension plans on the corporate investment choices between diversifying and non-diversifying investments. We find a firm’s DB plan coverage is negatively associated with its propensity of making a major investment. Subject to a major...

Pension economics has traditionally guided pension policy with the help of formal models based on individuals who think in a life cycle context with perfect foresight, full information, and in a time-consistent manner. This paper sheds light on selected aspects of pension economics when these...

In order to secure the retirement some Poles decided to save under the third pillar. This article presents proposals for additional forms of saving for retirement in the form of Employee or Personal Equity Plans proposed in the Strategy for Responsible Development - Capital Construction...

The main aim of the study is to identify the size of the pension gap in Poland and to estimate the level of supplementary savings needed to cover it. The issue of pension system income adequacy is first discussed, and the forecasted and targeted levels of replacement rates in Poland are...

This paper develops a structural dynamic retirement model to investigate effects and corresponding underlying mechanisms of a partial retirement program on labor supply, fiscal balances, and the pension income distribution. The structural approach allows for disentangling the two counteracting...

Die Europäische Zentralbank hat erstmals in der europäischen Geschichte den Leitzins auf null Prozent gesenkt. Diese überraschende Entscheidung wurde am 10.03.2016 in den Medien verbreitet. Der Report wurde verfasst vor dem Hintergrund der aktuellen Diskussion um die Niedrigzinsphase und den...

Both economic and epidemiological literature have shown that perceived high strain at work and lack of social infrastructures are good predictors of sick leave. The latter is particularly relevant in countries where facilities for children and care services are scarce and women are asked to fill...

Public pay-as-you-go pensions still form the dominant pillar of old-age provision in Germany. This is in marked contrast to the situation in Anglo-Saxon countries. It has advantages if labour markets are strong, e.g., following a quick recovery from the Great Recession. It has disadvantages, as...

The Croatian system of old-age provision comprises a traditional public pay-as-you-go scheme and a mandatory funded scheme ("second pillar") that will provide increasing amounts of supplementary pensions to those entering retirement in the future. Due to the continuing economic crisis, the...

This paper examines how families adjust their private old-age savings in response to a change in individual pension wealth. The regression discontinuity approach exploits two expansions of the child care pension benefit, in 1992 and in 1999, as natural experiments. The empirical analysis is...

Most defined contribution pension plans pay benefits as lump sums, yet the US Treasury has recently encouraged firms to protect retirees from outliving their assets by converting a portion of their plan balances into longevity income annuities (LIA). These are deferred annuities which initiate...

Governments are responding to fiscal pressures associated with aging populations by increasing the eligibility age for publicly-funded retirement benefits. However, recent studies show large resulting increases in the receipt of alternative payments, which raises concern that welfare savings are...

This paper examines the available data on market conditions for equity release schemes (ERS) in all EU member states to cluster Member States for subsequent extrapolation of the findings from six EU Member States (DE, IT, NL, IE, HU, and the UK) to the EU as a whole. It aggregates various...

Retirement policies are individually designed but the majority of people of retirement age live as couples. We estimate the effects of a French pension reform on spouses' employment decisions. We use labor-force survey data, pooled over different years, on fifty thousand French couples and apply...

Die drei hessischen Landtagsabgeordneten Al-Wazir (Grüne), Grüttner und Schäfer (CDU) schlagen eine obligatorische kapitalgedeckte Zusatzversorgung für jedermann vor. Was gut gemeint klingt, weist aber eine ganze Reihe von Schwachstellen auf.

This paper analyses the distributional effects of the Polish old-age pension reform introduced in 1999. Following a benchmark Mincer earnings equation, and using a newly developed microsimulation model we project future pension benefits for males born in years 1969–1979. We find that...

Old-age poverty is to become one of the most pressing issues in the coming decades given the demographic trends forecasted. Particularly in developing countries this could be an obstacle to inclusive and sustainable growth as well as the fight against all forms of poverty (SDG 1), through shocks...

Governments are responding to fiscal pressures associated with aging populations by increasing the eligibility age for publicly-funded retirement benefits. However, recent studies show large resulting increases in the receipt of alternative payments, which raises concern that welfare savings are...

A Danish tax reform, decided in May 2009 and taking effect from the beginning of 2010, lowered the marginal tax rate on top bracket taxable income from 63% to 56%. Because contributions to pension accounts are tax deductible, the reform provided an incentive to increase pension contributions...

How can retirement savings be increased? We explore a unique policy change in the context of the German pension system to study this question. As of 2004, the German pension authority started to send out annual letters providing detailed and comprehensible information about the pension system...

Background: The pension deficit has been rapidly enlarging for more than a decade. If the retirement age is set at a low level, it might trigger a pensions crisis. Since the average life span of the Chinese has extended from 71 to 76 years old in last ten years, the feasibility of rising the...