Since the inception of the Journal, it has been published in conjunction with the International Network of Pension Regulators and Supervisors (INPRS), a network setup and administered by the OECD. Because of the importance of pension supervision, it has become clear that a network such as the INPRS is not enough and as a result a new international organization, International Organisation of Pension Supervisors (IOPS), has been formed and will deal with issues relating to pensions supervision. The OECD will provide secretariat services for IOPS as it did for INPRS. Going forward, we are grateful to have the support from IOPS to be publishing the Journal in association with them. The OECD's private pension working party will handle more policy-related issues and we are also grateful to have the support from this group. Going forward therefore the Journal will be published in association with IOPS and the OECD.

The article presents a method for calculating the cross-section internal rate of return on contributions to pension systems financed according to the pay-as-you-go principle. The method entails a procedure for valuing the contribution flow of pay-as-you-go financing, and identifies the complete set of factors that determine the cross-section internal rate of return. The procedure makes it possible to apply the algorithm of double-entry bookkeeping in analyzing and presenting the financial position and development of pay-as-you-go pension systems.

Within a model featuring demographic uncertainty, this paper studies a pension reform where public pension benefits are indexed to the total wage bill rather than to the average wage level. This implies a decline in the variability of contribution rates and an increase in the variability of replacement rates. While thus shifting some of the adjustment burden following demographic shocks to pensioners, the trade-off in risks is found to be fairly moderate.

This paper examines the potential impact of government matching contributions on personal-account participation in the President's Commission on Strengthening Social Security's Model 3 for Social Security reform. Given the government's choice of four plan-design parameters, the magnitude of the match is determined solely by the differential return personal-account assets receive above the notional return, referred to as the ‘personal-account premium’, akin to the equity premium. The impact of matching on personal-account participation is simulated for older workers (ages 40 to 65) in the first wave of the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) using empirical estimates from a structural model of the impact of employer matching on participation in corporate 401(k) plans. For a personal-account premium of three percentage points, which implies a match rate of 7.5% for middle- to lower-income workers, the simulations imply that 72% of mid-career and older workers would participate in voluntary personal accounts. The response of participation to matching is very inelastic; it seems not unlikely that participation by mid-career and older workers would achieve the mid-range assumption by the Commission of 67%. There is substantial heterogeneity in participation across subsets of older workers: participation would be the lowest for low-educated, minority, female, and unmarried mid-career and older workers.

Immigration is often thought of as a measure suited to mitigate the fiscal consequences of demographic ageing for unfunded public pension schemes. Building on Sinn (1997), the paper explores in some more detail the conditions under which immigrants are a net fiscal asset for national pension budgets not only on a temporary basis – i.e., as long as they are paying contributions and before they start drawing benefits – but also in the long run. Illustrative simulations are provided for the cases of Germany, Italy, the UK, and the US. It turns out that the value of immigrants depends on the nature of the pension scheme (Bismarck vs Beveridge). Also, it is strongly affected by the immigrants' characteristics in terms of skills and fertility. Furthermore, effects differ substantially for the cases of temporary vs permanent migration.