The Dutch pension sector was hit hard by the financial crises of 2008 and 2011. The effects of these crises combined with the structural problems of aging and longevity caused some pension funds to fail. This caused a public debate about the collective pension schemes in the Netherlands. It also raised the question whether pension funds are too important to fail and/or too big to save and what the consequences are.

The U. S. economy experienced a shift away from employment with coverage under a defined benefit (DB) pension plan during 1991-2009. Defined contribution (DC) plan coverage seems not to have risen much, if at all, for married men in the recent decade. Overall, the percent of the labor force covered by any pension type fell over the period 2001-2009, with most of the shift occurring in 2001-2003, as indicated by data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID).

Demographic changes in the UK mean that life expectancy is increasing and the ratio of people eligible to claim the State Pension relative to the working population is rising. At the same time there has been a long-term decline in the level of private saving for later life.

This study uses restricted microdata from the National Compensation Survey to examine the impact of auto enrollment on employee compensation. By boosting plan participation, automatic enrollment likely increases employer costs when previously unenrolled workers receive matching retirement plan contributions.

The focus of this thesis is the intergenerational effects of the second pillar pension plan redesign in the Netherlands. We propose a tool that combines generational accounting and value-based ALM that adopts risk neutral valuation to assess the redistribution effects of different changes in the pension plan.

Part time work can facilitate participation in the labor market and smooth the transition to retirement. Part-time employment, however, represents for the most part an involuntary choice. The aim of this paper is to conduct an empirical investigation of the determinants of part-time work. Using Spanish labor market data, we find that parttime work becomes a more desired employment alternative as people age, and that education and children’s age have opposite effects on women and men’s probabilities of voluntary part-time employment. Interestingly, most part-time work among women occurs in low-skill occupations, whereas part-time work among men are mainly concentrated in high-skill jobs

This article examines the impact of labour market, financial market and demographic risks on
retirement income derived from defined contribution (DC) pension plans. The amount of retirement income that people investing in DC plans will get after retirement depends on several parameters that are not known with certainty. Indeed, labour market outcomes, such as employment prospects and real wage career paths, are uncertain. Moreover, future realisations of returns on different asset classes, portfolio returns, interest rates and inflation are also uncertain, as well as future life expectancy. These labour, financial and demographic risks make the amount of retirement income that is derived from DC plans inherently uncertain.

The design of default investment options in defined contribution (DC) pension plans is of critical
policy relevance, as many members of DC plans are incapable or unwilling to choose investment
strategies among the great variety offered to them. There is increasing international consensus that some type of life-cycle strategy is desirable for default options, with decreasing risk exposure as the individual ages.

While the immediate concern is the current financial market crisis, the key challenges for pension systems over the medium and long-term are dealing with the implications of population ageing, the design of the payout phase of pensions, in particular the type of products to channel assets accumulated in defined contribution (DC) pension plans (e.g. life annuities), as well as examining the role that financial markets can play in providing adequate private pensions.

Retirement systems and labour-market regimes are persistent institutions that affect most individuals in society, albeit in different ways. Reforming them thus entails large distributional effects, since it typically generates winners and losers. Theoretically, the electoral cost (or benefit of retirement and/or labour-market reforms should depend on the magnitude of the reform’s impact on the winners and losers, and on their relative political influence.

This report provides an independent assessment of the potential impact of the state pension reforms set out in the Government’s Green Paper: A State Pension for the 21st Century.

The research was commissioned by the National Association of Pension Funds (NAPF) who asked the PPI to consider the potential impact of the reforms on Government spending on pensions and on means-tested benefits, on the gainers and losers for the reforms, and on the potential wider impact on private pensions.

Utträdesåldern är påtagligt högre för personer med hög utbildning än för dem med lägre.
Med hög utbildning följer i regel ett arbete som är mindre fysiskt påfrestande och ofta
också ett som är mer stimulerande intellektuellt. Den stigande utbildningsnivån – inte
minst hos 1940-talskullarna jämfört med tidigare generationer – har bidragit till att utträdesåldern
stigit sedan 1990-talets mitt, även om ökningstakten har dämpats på senare tid.