Pensions are inherently risky because they are long-term contracts. These contracts can involve up to four groups of actors: individuals, governments, employers and financial-services providers. Uncertainty about the future complicates planning for all these actors: if things turn out better than expected, who will reap the gains? If things turn out worse, who will bear the cost? No one wants to bear risk, but, in most cases, someone has to. Risks in pension systems have, in the past, been poorly measured or even just
ignored.

Intergenerational risk sharing by funded pension schemes may increase welfare in an ex ante sense. However, it also suffers from a time inconsistency problem. In particular, young generations may be unwilling to start participating in a pension scheme if this requires them to make huge transfers to older generations.

The life insurance and pensions sector manages large funds with a truly long time horizon. These investors therefore naturally seek long-dated assets to match their liabilities. Real assets or real cash flows are preferred in order to hedge against inflation, which is particularly relevant for pension funds in order to assure a decent purchasing power for their clients’ retirement income.

EU social and employment policies increasingly emphasise extending working life and increasing effective retirement age. Over the past few years, it has become more common for Europeans to work beyond the age at which they are entitled to a statutory or occupational pension.

Since the creation of the Old Age Pension scheme (Algemene Ouderdomswet, henceforth; AOW) in 1957 some important changes in its regulation have taken place. The purpose of this study is to analyse the redistribution of income for different individuals in the AOW taking into account these changes in regulation and different groups of individuals according to their gender, civil status and income.

This paper examines the role of ethnic networks in disability program take-up among working-age immigrants in the United States.

The life insurance and pensions sector manages large funds with a truly long time horizon. These investors therefore naturally seek long-dated assets to match their liabilities. Real assets or real cash flows are preferred in order to hedge against inflation, which is particularly relevant for pension funds in order to assure a decent purchasing power for their clients’ retirement income.

In the struggle of historical institutionalism to explain the origin and change of institutions, the state-of-the-art is currently represented by Streeck and Thelen’s (2005) study Beyond continuity. The book departs from the previous, bifurcated literature, which divides institutional evolution into long periods of stasis, characterised by incremental change and short, sudden bursts of institutional innovation. The authors, in fact, focus on change as a combination of process and result. In particular, they show how a rigid dichotomy between typically path dependent incremental adaptation (or simply continuity) and radical transformation does not capture important transformative processes common to advanced political economies. Most innovatively, their contribution focuses on examples of radical but at the same time gradual transformation.

Indkomsten er en meget vigtig indikator for vores levevilkår. Penge giver i sig selv tryghed mod det uforudsete, og penge kan også konverteres til god bolig, sund mad, spændende fritidsfornøjelser og meget andet, som forbedrer vores levevilkår. For almindelige familier er privatforbruget og de indkomster, der giver grundlaget for det, i en vis forstand slutresultatet af de økonomiske aktiviteter i samfundet.

In Sweden, employers pay non-wage costs for their workforce in the form of legislated
employment tax and collective fees. For parts of the workforce, the collective fees are
progressive with respect to the employee’s age and wage. The objective of this paper is to
examine how non-wage costs affect voluntary early retirement. To this end we use a large
longitudinal employer–employee matched data set with administrative records of the private
sector in Sweden. We exploit the variation in collective fee costs across companies to identify
employer incentives to encourage early retirement. The results from the instrumental variable
estimator suggest that a 1 percentage point increase in non-wage costs in relation to wage
costs increases retirement by 6 percent. Further, given the wage sum and workforce structure,
large firms spend more on non-wage compensation than small firms. The share of non-wage
costs in relation to the wage sum is also positively linked to net employment growth.

The objective of this paper is to examine how employers’ non-wage costs for their workforce affect voluntary early retirement, using the case of the Swedish private sector. The results show that a 1 percentage point increase in non-wage costs in relation to wage costs increases retirement by 6 percent. Further, given the wage sum and workforce structure, large firms spend more on non-wage compensation than small firms.