We study the effects of pension reform on hours worked, human capital, income and welfare in an open economy populated by four overlapping generations: three active generations (the young, the middle aged and the older) and one generation of retired. Within each generation we distinguish individuals with high, medium or low ability to build human capital. Our simulation results prefer a pay-as-you-go pension system with a particular earnings-related linkage above a fully-funded private system. This pay-as-you-go system conditions pension benefits on past individual labor income, with a high weight on labor income earned when older and a low weight on labor income earned when young. Uncorrected, however, such a system implies welfare losses for current low-ability generations and rising inequality. Complementing or replacing it by basic and/or minimum pension components is negative for aggregate employment and welfare. Better is to maintain the tight link between individual labor income and the pension also for low-ability individuals, but to strongly raise their replacement rate. An additional correction improving the welfare of low-ability individuals would be to maintain for these individuals equal weights on past labor income.

Many organizations have either already terminated their defined benefit (DB) plans or are thinking about it, in order to offload the financial and regulatory risks these programs pose. But plan sponsors should think carefully about how their decision might affect their workers' commitment and productivity – and ultimately their organization's success.

To answer those and other retirement questions, Watson Wyatt set out to learn how DB and defined contribution (DC) plans affect employees' workforce behavior and decisions. Watson Wyatt's Retirement Attitude Survey (WWRAS) found that, while most workers value both types of plans very highly, workers with DB plans generally appreciate their retirement programs significantly more than those with only a DC plan. This was particularly the case for those with a hybrid pension plan. This analysis found that retirement plan generosity and effective communication strongly affect a plan's perceived value to employees. This has important implications for plan sponsors, since greater plan appreciation is strongly linked to employee commitment. In fact, we found that workers covered by a defined benefit plan express a very strong commitment to their current employer, while DC plan coverage has no effect on employee commitment. This is partly owing to a selection effect, whereby firms with DB plans tend to attract more committed workers. However, even after controlling for the selection effect, DB plans exert an independent effect on the likelihood that employees will stay with their employer.

We investigate the impact of receiving a public pension on total expenditures, food expenditures, and private transfers of the elderly in South Korea. Using a natural experiment that occurred in 1999, we are able to explore the impacts of a large public pension program expansion which newly incorporated people who had been self-employed, unemployed, and out of the labor force. We find that receipt of a public pension did not allow the elderly to increase total expenditures or food expenditures because the expansion of public pensions largely crowded out financial transfers from adult children and/or own siblings.

This paper takes a look at the modeling side of pension fund management. It is based on interviews with pension fund managers, regulators, consultants, and academics in four countries – the Netherlands, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The objective was to understand, through the experience of market participants, the role of modeling in managing defined-benefit pension funds. The 28 defined-benefit pension funds participating in the study have a total of €334 billion ($436 billion) assets under management. The findings of our study show that modeling is now considered an indispensable tool by many market participants. The need to manage the risk inherent in defined-benefit pension plans is the key motivation behind the growing use of modeling. In the Netherlands, for example, where private-sector plans did not experience serious underfunding problems after the 2000 market crash, the use of modeling is widespread and well-integrated in the decision-making process. Dutch regulators have recently mandated a risk-based approach and specified broad principles of sound modeling, including the marking to market of assets and liabilities.

Who values life annuities more? Is it the healthy retiree who expects to live long and might become a centenarian, or is the unhealthy retiree with a short life expectancy more likely to appreciate the pooling of longevity risk? What if the unhealthy retiree is pooled with someone who is much healthier and forced to pay an implicit loading? To answer these and related questions this paper examines the empirical conditions under which retirees benefit (or may not) from longevity risk pooling by linking the economics of annuity equivalent wealth to actuarially models of aging. I focus attention on the Compensation Law of Mortality which implies that individuals with higher relative mortality (e.g., lower income) age more slowly and experience greater longevity uncertainty. Ergo, they place higher utility value on the annuity. The impetus for this research today is the increasing evidence on the growing disparity in longevity expectations between rich and poor.

State and local pension plans are increasingly moving from the traditional defined benefit (DB) model to non-DB models that generally allow for participant-directed investment. This shift has important implications for the management of the more than US$3 trillion in assets held to finance public employee retirement benefits. To investigate these implications, we introduce new data from a nationwide survey of public DB and non-DB plans and a unique data set on thousands of individual investors in the state of Florida's defined contribution (DC) plan. Using these sources, we explore how participant involvement in the public sector affects the distribution of asset class allocations, management fees, investment outcomes, and portfolio rebalancing at both the individual and aggregate levels. We found that there is little difference between the DB and non-DB plans in terms of asset mix, returns, and fees, except that DB plan have greater access and allocations to alternative investments. We also found that while the average individual DC plan participant allocated their asset similarly to the DB plan, black females and older white males, on average, invested on opposite tails of the risk spectrum.

The share of workers who are self-employed rises markedly with age. Given policy concerns about inadequate retirement savings, especially among those with lower education, and the resulting interest in encouraging employment at older ages, it is important to understand the role that self-employment arrangements play in facilitating work among seniors. New data from a survey module fielded on a Gallup telephone survey distinguish independent contractor work from other self-employment and provide information on informal and online platform work. The Gallup data show that, especially after accounting for individuals who are miscoded as employees, self-employment is even more prevalent at older ages than suggested by existing data. Work as an independent contractor is the most common type of self-employment. Roughly one-quarter of independent contractors aged 50 and older work for a former employer. At older ages, self-employment generally – and work as an independent contractor specifically – is more common among the highly educated, accounting for much of the difference in employment rates across education groups. We provide suggestive evidence that differences in opportunities for independent contractor work play an important role in the lower employment rates of less-educated older adults.

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.

We present novel estimates of Social Security Wealth (SSW) at the individual level based on the SHARE survey. Our estimates are based on a rigorous methodology taking into account country-specific legislations, the earning history and the longevity prospects of individuals. The key advantage over existing estimates is that our measures of SSW are fully comparable across countries. This allows us to construct indexes of the redistribution enacted by the pension systems in Europe. Finally, we provide descriptive evidence of the relationship between SSW and private wealth.

The Chilean national pension system is often viewed as the model for moving from a pay-as-you-go system to a prefunded, individual account system. One measure of its success has been its 12% average real rate of return. This study uses monthly return data to examine the source of these returns and to compare the risk-adjusted returns of the pension system to those of Chilean stock indices, debt instruments, and mutual funds. Tests using the Sharpe ratio and the multi-factor Jensen alpha suggest that the pension returns are consistent with the overall riskiness of the Chilean economy. Based on our findings, neither the structure of the Chilean pension system nor the performance of the fund managers should permit the system to earn abnormally high returns in the future.

Employer-related pensions are a common and extremely important component of the compensation paid to workers in both the public and private sectors of developed economies. Many private pensions are insufficiently funded, exposing workers to the risk of a loss should their employer cease operations and not be available to meet pension obligations.

In this paper we study the role of guarantee funds as providers of insurance to workers against the failure of firms with underfunded defined benefit pension plans. Employing a model that predicts pension underfunding, we consider first how private guarantee funds might operate and then explore some potential advantages of public funds.

Overall, we do find that both public and private funds provide insurance benefits. However, private guarantee funds requiring ex ante premia payments may be infeasible in the presence of capital market imperfections, and funds which rely upon ex post contributions may suffer from strategic uncertainty. A public fund can overcome this coordination problem. However, a public fund, such as that administered by the US Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, may lead to: (i) greater underfunding of pensions, (ii) distortions in the market participation decisions of firms and (iii) the inclusion of excessively risky assets in the pension portfolio. In some cases, a guarantee fund is not welfare improving.

Collective pension schemes are the dominant form of saving for retirement in the Netherlands. We investigate the introduction of individual choices into a collective pension system without affecting the generally accepted advantages of a collective agreement. Increasing individual choices can be beneficial, as it prevents pension plans from making decisions for the average plan participant that may not be optimal for individual participants. We argue for a system in which individuals choose from a set of low-cost balanced index funds, together with a level of intergenerational guarantees that are exchange-traded. This system maintains the two primary advantages of collective agreements: risk sharing and low implementation costs, while facilitating different risk taking behavior at the individual level. To facilitate individual choices within collective pension schemes, it is important to enhance the transparency associated with intergenerational guarantees to all participants in the scheme, both in terms of their price and quantity. We argue that the current system, in which long-term guarantees are given by the young to the old within a specific fund but not across pension funds, is not transparent and we argue that it can be suboptimal. We propose a system of Pension Guarantee Exchanges (PGEs) that increase transparency and allow pension funds with different age distributions to trade with each other. Knowing the price of such guarantees facilitates the introduction of individual portfolio choices within collective pension schemes.

Some retirement plans allow the participant to choose how funds are invested. Having to direct investments may provide the participant with financial education. This paper finds that U.S. households covered by pension plans in which the employee chooses investments are significantly more apt to hold stock outside of their retirement plan than are households with pension plans offering no such choice. The effect of investment choice upon non-pension asset allocation is not explained by portfolio rebalancing or observable differences in income and saving preferences across households. This provides some evidence that the design of a pension plan may influence an employee's financial decisions outside of the pension plan, although unobserved heterogeneity in worker's preferences could also explain the result.

The evolution of hybrid conversions has prompted a number of high-profile legal challenges. In response, policymakers have attempted to force companies transitioning from a traditional DB to a hybrid plan to offer all workers the open-ended choice of remaining in the old DB plan, versus switching to the new hybrid plan. This paper evaluates ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ under these plan conversions and estimates the cost to plan sponsors of such a mandate. We find that mandating choice could increase plan sponsors' pension expenses above their current cost for traditional defined benefit plans. In the end, rising costs of pensions could endanger plan sponsorship altogether. Policymakers seeking to mandate pension choice should take into account these possible undesirable outcomes of such a law.

In light of the declining pension coverage of low-income workers, policy makers have discussed requiring all employers to offer individual retirement accounts, similar to defined contribution plans. How likely to participate are workers who currently do not have access to a pension plan? We address this question by using plausibly exogenous variation in pension-plan availability to estimate the determinants of participation in a standard selection on unobservables model. We find that currently uncovered low-income workers are fairly likely to participate in a newly offered plan, yet they are much less likely to do so than currently covered workers.

Along with data about actual, desired, and anticipated job characteristics, this paper uses a novel data element, the subjective conditional probability of working at age 70, to estimate the causal effects of job characteristics on retirement in the United States. Having flexible work hours is the most consistent predictor of retirement preferences and expectations: if all current workers had flexible hours, the fraction working at age 70 would be 0.322, but it would be just 0.172 if none had this option. Job stress, physical, and cognitive job demands, the option to telecommute, and commuting times were additional predictors of retirement expectations.

The Pension Benefits Guarantee Fund (PBGF) was established in the province of Ontario in 1980, thus creating in Canada a rare opportunity for intranational empirical research on the impacts of governmental protection on private plans and their participants. This paper examines Canadian data on pension plans for effects attributable to Ontario's government guarantees for some plans. We find that significant variables related to an increase in the number of pension plans in Canada are higher interest rates, a larger labour market, and, consistent with the deferred compensation theory from labour economics, lower real disposable income of workers. The number of members in pension plans is related significantly to the same variables and also to tax rates and unemployment. The analyses show that the Ontario environment for pension plans is significantly different from the rest of Canada. Those plans covered by the Pension Benefit Guarantee Fund exhibit a lower degree of funding per participant than do the remainder of the plans in the sample, supporting the argument that a government guarantee is related to a moral hazard problem in Ontario pension financing.

A simulation approach is used to investigate how various investment strategies affect the ability of retirees to spend at a desired level up until death. Retirees are assumed to maintain all investment and longevity risk, and also have access to a government-sponsored and means-tested Age Pension to provide part of their desired expenditure. It is found that a 100% allocation to growth assets is optimal for large expenditure desires relative to initial balance levels, with allocations outside of this being sensitive to movements in initial balance and desired expenditure level, as well as interactions with the Age Pension.

This study documents an important role for Social Security income in workers’ retirement timing. About 40% of public school teachers are not covered by Social Security. This provides an opportunity to analyze the causal impact of Social Security on retirement timing by comparing covered and non-covered teachers. Using individual-level data from the American Community Survey, we find robust evidence of higher rates of retirement among covered teachers at Social Security eligibility ages. This pattern is confirmed using an alternative regression model of participation in the teacher labor force. These estimates suggest that, should the federal government mandate full inclusion in Social Security for all public sector workers, the retirement timing patterns of newly covered teachers and other public sector workers would likely change.

In this article we estimate the relative contributions to the gender pension gap of career duration and income earned at different points along the pension income distribution, as well as the role played by minimum pensions and other partly or wholly non-contributory policies in reducing this gap. Our research covers all retirees in France in 2012 employed in the public or private sector at least once in their lifetimes. We first highlight that at every point in the distribution, the gender pension gap is wider for private-sector retirees than for those in the public sector. This is because public sector careers are less fragmented and because the calculation of the public sector reference wage does not penalize career interruptions so heavily. This relative advantage of women in the public sector is probably an additional factor explaining their over-representation in this sector. Applying the decomposition method proposed by Firpo et al. (2007, 2009), we show that composition differences in the gender pension gap are essentially due to differences in contribution periods and wages, with a smaller effect of career duration in the public sector than in the private. In the first deciles, the gap can be attributed largely to differences in career duration. This effect gradually weakens, and differences in the reference wage become the main explanation. We also show that minimum contributory pensions play an extremely important role in limiting the gender pension gap in the first deciles, essentially in the private sector. Last, we show that in all cases the unexplained share of the pension gap is substantial only at the bottom of the distribution and, to a lesser extent, in the top decile. The unexplained share is generally smaller than the explained one and favours men.