2020

Due to increasing life expectancy pension benefits and savings need to last longer, which casts doubt on the financial security of retirees. Surprisingly, what pension benefit level can be considered adequate remains unclear. In this paper, we propose an identification strategy for the estimation of pension adequacy standards.

To shed light on the effects of individual choice on pension wealth, we study a policy change to the management fees of pension funds implemented by Peru’s government in 2013. The reform established a new balance fee as a default option; this fee is calculated as a percentage of the pension balance. Each individual had the initial option of keeping the previous management fee, a load factor fee calculated as a percentage of the individual’s salary.

In the last decades, many governments have enacted flexible retirement reforms as a seemingly elegant way to increase older workers’ labor supply. Börsch-Supan et al. (2018) use the synthetic control method to evaluate the effects of flexibility reforms from nine OECD countries that came into effect between 1992 and 2006. To evaluate the significance of the treatment effects, the authors apply in-space placebo studies. This paper scrutinizes these results by applying in-time placebo studies.

IZA discussion paper by Asbjørn Goul Andersen, Simen Markussen, Knut Røed (The Ragnar Frisch Centre for Economic Research).

We provide empirical evidence that the removal of work disincentives embedded in retirement earnings tests can increase old-age labor supply considerably, but it does so at the cost of more income inequality.

In this meta-analysis I try to answer the question what the causal effect of retirement on health is. There are many conflicting results in the literature, partly because of the endogenous relationship between retirement and health. I’ve collected 576 results from 61 studies around the world into the causal effect of retirement on health.

Retirement is commonly described as a pure labor-supply decision, despite the potential importance of the demand side. This partly reflects that the two dimensions are often difficult to disentangle. I here manage to overcome this difficulty by using a unique natural experiment, the progressive ban on mandatory retirement in France in the 2000s.

Alarmed by the worsening health for middle-aged baby-boomers in the US, we conduct a cohort analysis of health deficits similar to Abeliansky and Strulik (2019) but focus on middle-aged individuals. As opposed to previous findings, we find that health among the middle-aged has stalled, and in some cases worsened, for the more recent birth cohorts.

Over the past decades, combining pension benefits with work income has been made more accessible for pensioners in many European countries. The literature on working pensioners choosing a flexible transition into retirement is to date relatively sparse. This article adds to the few cross-country studies and explicitly investigates the role of pension systems in facilitating or hampering flexible retirement.

As many governments attempt to contain rising expenditure on retirement pensions by increasing eligibility ages, there are concerns that such reforms disproportionately affect poorer households. In this paper, I examine this trade-off in the context of a 1994 Australian reform that increased women’s pensioneligibility age from 60 to 65.

Many countries have recently increased retirement ages. The central question is, do individuals know about these new pension rules? And do they adjust their pension expectations and labor market behavior accordingly?

Since the 1980s, computers have reshaped the job market, replacing workers in jobs that rely on routine tasks, from bank tellers to auto workers.

In response, workers moved to two types of non-routine jobs beyond the reach of computers: cognitive (e.g., analysts) and physical (e.g., food servers).

This report compares the financial wellness of Generation X to the preceding generation, Baby Boomers and the following generation Millennials. It explores the risks they face in later life and how policy, industry and employer interventions could mitigate these risks.