A quirk in the Social Security benefit formula interacting with the sharp economic downturn due to the COVID-19 pandemic could cause certain groups of near-retirees to suffer significant and permanent reductions to their Social Security retirement benefits. A sudden decline in the Social Security Administration (SSA)'s measure of economywide average wages in the year a worker turns 60 causes the Social Security benefit formula to devalue all the worker's earnings prior to age 60, resulting in a lower measure of career-average earnings and a lower benefit in retirement. A middle-income worker aged 60 in 2020 could receive an annual Social Security benefit reduction of around 9%, with losses through retirement approaching $46,000. Individuals becoming eligible for Social Security Disability Insurance benefits would be subject to similar reductions in percentage terms. Several methods are discussed to reduce or eliminate the likelihood of similar benefit ‘notches’ occurring in the future.

We explore the relationships between financial trust and behaviors, attitudes, knowledge, and preferences related to utilizing professional financial advice. Using survey data from the RAND American Life Panel, we find that financial trust is correlated with advice usage and likelihood of seeking advisory services. Leveraging an experiment that randomized provision of and access to advice, we find that trust is an important predictor of who chooses to receive advice, even after controlling for demographic characteristics and financial literacy. However, providing unsolicited advice has little impact on behavior, even for individuals with high levels of trust.

This study examines the distribution options of 85 large public retirement plans covering general state employees, teachers, and local government employees. The interest rates used to price annuities vary considerably across the plans. As a result, retirees with the same monthly benefit if a single life benefit is chosen will have substantially different monthly benefits if they select a joint and survivor annuity. We examine the impact of variation in the pricing of annuity options using both cross-plan differences in interest rates and the change in the choice of annuity options in one plan after the price of options changes due to new assumed interest rates and mortality rates.

Due to structural and policy shifts, pension deficit in North Macedonia doubled over a decade and significantly outpaced the central budget deficit. The objective of the paper is to examine fiscal and development effects of few pension-reform designs. We constructed MK-PENS Dynamic Microsimulation Pension Model and simulated the effects of few reforms affecting one stakeholder and few combined reforms. Results robustly suggest that without reform and assuming only statutory pension adjustment, the deficit will remain as is. Simulated scenarios suggest that proposed pension reforms significantly reduce the pension deficit, with the most favourable results obtained within the combined scenarios of shared burden. Gradual introduction of reform's elements should come into play in case large political cost is envisaged.

Explaining cross-country differences in current accounts is difficult. While pay-as-you-go pensions reduce the need to save for retirement, contributions to capital-funded pensions are saved for future consumption. An overlapping-generations analysis shows that capital-funded pensions increase net foreign assets holdings. With a multi-pillar system whose capital-funded part accounts for 18% of pensions, the Austrian current account balance would be 1 percentage point of gross domestic product (GDP) higher than with pure pay-as-you-go pensions in 20 years. By comparison, the Austrian current account surplus averages 1.8% of GDP. Empirically, I find that the current account of high-income countries increases with the coverage and replacement rates of capital-funded pensions.

Defined benefit pension funds invest in illiquid asset classes for return, diversification or liability hedging reasons. So far, little is known about factors influencing how much they invest in illiquid assets. We conjecture that liquidity and capital requirements are pivotal in this decision. Short-term pension payments and margining on derivative contracts generate liquidity requirements, while regulations impose capital requirements. Consistent with our model we empirically find that these requirements create a hump-shaped impact of liability duration on the fraction of risky assets invested in illiquid assets. Further, we report that pension fund size, type, and funding ratio impact illiquid assets allocations.

We examine the investment performance of Chilean pension funds during their multi-fund period (2003–17). Using tradable asset class benchmarks, we extend Sharpe's (1992) return-based style analysis by explicitly considering regulatory restrictions and currency hedging. We find that despite the significant differences between pension fund manager returns, they are statistically similar to our style benchmarks for all fund types. Furthermore, accounting for currency hedging improves the accuracy of the replicating portfolios and the selection return estimates. Our results have policy implications for investment regulation of pension systems with similar characteristics to the Chilean one.

We examine pension-cost crowd out of salary expenditures in the public sector using a 15-year data panel of state teacher pension plans spanning the Great Recession. While there is no evidence of salary crowd out prior to the Great Recession, there is a shift in the post-recession years such that a 1% (of salaries) increase in the annual required pension contribution corresponds to a decrease in total teacher salary expenditures of 0.24%. The effect operates through changes to the size of the teaching workforce, not changes to teacher wages. An explanation for the effect heterogeneity pre- and post-recession is that public employers are less able to shield the workforce from pension costs during times of fiscal stress. This problem is exacerbated because unlike other benefit costs, such as for health care, pension costs are countercyclical.