2014

Many state and local governments have responded to challenges facing their pension plans by cutting benefits.  Will these cuts make it harder for state and local governments to recruit and retain high-quality workers?  To date, the answer has been difficult to obtain; most micro-level datasets contain information on the existence of pensions but not on pension generosity.

Faced with a rapidly aging labor force, increasing the labor supply of older workers has become an important goal for European countries. Offering additional leave to older workers with the option of withdrawing a contractual pension (contractual early retirement pension AFP) has become a widespread retention measure in Norwegian companies.

Australia has an atypical retirement income system: it comprises a flat-rate, non-contributory, affluence-tested age pension, and a mandatory, defined contribution accumulation plan to which employers must contribute 9.25% (moving to 12%) of wages on behalf of their employees.

With automatic enrolment now well under way and around 9 million employees expected to be newly saving or saving more in pension schemes by 2018, there has been increasing focus on the design and quality of Defined Contribution (DC) schemes. So far the focus has mainly been on the accrual stage, employer contribution levels, the design of default investment strategies, and the level and transparency of charges.

Stochastic mortality models have been developed for a range of applications from demographic projections to financial management. Financial risk based models build on methods used for interest rates and apply these to mortality rates. They have the advantage of being applied to financial pricing and the management of longevity risk.

Disability insurance (DI) beneficiaries lose part of their benefits if their earnings exceed certain thresholds (“cash-cliffs”). This implicit taxation is considered the prime reason for low DI outflow.

Mortgage debt in the Netherlands is the highest among all countries in Europe. At the same time, the dutch pension system has always been regarded as one of the best worldwide, mainly because of the high replacement rates.

At den svære pensjonsreformen kom seg gjennom demokratiets mølle brøt med gjengse teorier. Helt over målstreken kom likevel reformen ikke, ifølge forsker.

This publication presents the results of the OECD project on mortality assumptions and longevity risk. The project looks first at the mortality tables typically used by pension funds and annuity providers to determine the amount of funding needed to meet future expected pension and annuity payments.

Population aging and the poor performance of financial markets during recent years put the sustainability of pension arrangements in many Western countries under pressure. In order to investigate whether the Dutch will be able to cope with possible cutbacks in the generosity of pensions, we analyze their preparedness for retirement in 2008, at the eve of the prolonged downturn.

This paper exploits a combination of policy variation from multiple pension reforms in Austria and administrative data from the Austrian Social Security Database.

In many European countries, the labor market participation of older workers is considerably lower than the labor market participation of prime-age workers. This study analyzes the variation in labor market withdrawal of older workers across 13 European countries over the period 1995-2008.