Working longer is a powerful lever to enhance retirement security. Individuals, on average, are healthier, live longer, and face less physically demanding jobs, so they should be able to extend the number of years worked. But averages are misleading when differences in health, job prospects, and life expectancy have widened between individuals with low and high socioeconomic status (SES). Thus, a single prescription for all no longer seems appropriate.

By increasing the residual working horizon of employed individuals, pension reforms that raise minimum retirement age are likely to affect the returns to investments in health-promoting behaviours before retirement, with consequences for individual health.

In the face of rising life expectancies, many policy experts argue that today’s workers can retire later and still spend the same fraction of their lives in retirement as past generations. But such an argument assumes that all workers, regardless of socioeconomic status (SES), have experienced the same increase in life expectancy.

In several countries where pensions are reformed and the retirement age is increased, the issue came up to make an exception for workers with demanding occupations, since health considerations may make it unreasonable to expect them to work longer. We analyze unique Dutch survey data on the public's opinions on what are demanding occupations, on whether it is justified that someone with a demanding occupation can retire earlier, and on the willingness to contribute to an earlier retirement scheme for such occupations through higher taxes.

Much of the disagreement over whether households are adequately prepared for retirement reflects differences in assumptions regarding the extent to which consumption declines when the kids leave home.

While declines in physical and mental performance are inevitable as workers age, they are not uniform across the various systems of the body – some physical and cognitive abilities decline much earlier than others.  This variance implies that workers in occupations that rely on skills that decline early may be unable to work until late ages, even as policy changes like increases in the Full Retirement Age (FRA) encourage them to.

Based on large-scale survey data from the 2006-2012 waves of the US Health and Retirement Study (HRS) we show that individual portfolio decisions are influenced by a variety of traits and facets traditionally investigated in the field of personality psychology.

Americans need to save more on their own for retirement, but human nature suggests they will focus more on day-to-day financial needs.

The magnitude of the effect that health has on the retirement decision has long been studied. We examine the reverse relationship, whether or not retirement has a direct impact on later-life health. In order to identify the causal relationship, we use unexpected early retirement window offers to instrument for retirement behavior.

At Budget 2014, the Chancellor announced that all restrictions on how individuals aged 55 and over can access their pensions will be lifted from April 2015 onwards. This briefing note provides an overview of findings from research, conducted on behalf of AllianceBernstein by Opinium research, with Defined Contribution savers around their needs under the new pension flexibilities.

Research shows that pensions help recruit and retain high-quality workers; thus, cutbacks in public pensions could hurt worker quality. One indicator of quality is the wage that a worker can earn in the private sector. Using this measure, states and localities consistently have a “quality gap” – the workers they lose have a higher private sector wage than those they gain.

The Pensions Regulator commissioned IFF Research to undertake quantitative research to better understand the costs of administering defined benefit (DB) pension schemes. A total of 316 private sector schemes, which are the focus on this report, completed the survey.