Proposed changes to the Social Security system will affect the financial risk workers will face in their retirement differently across the income distribution. This study examines levels of financial risk workers face at different points in the lifetime earnings distribution. To do so, we use a microsimulation model that projects individual demographic and economic characteristics within the context of the Social Security system and the macroeconomy to assess the impact of two policy changes on the levels of lifetime benefits available to current and future retirees. Further, we incorporate data on pensions and savings to illustrate differences in the level and distribution of retirement funds across the earnings distribution. This exercise allows us to assess the financial risk workers face in their retirement, both within the Social Security system itself and within a broader view of the stream of total available retirement funds. We also use survey data to show that low earners are the least willing to tolerate such risk.

We present a quantitative analysis of the impact of differential ageing and pension reforms on capital and labor market and, in particular, on intra-European capital flows. To this end, we develop a stylized general equilibrium model with overlapping generations of heterogeneous agents for the three largest European countries: France, Germany and the United Kingdom. The model presents a structure halfway between pure general equilibrium models with rigorous microeconomic foundations and accounting models where the macroeconomic environment remains exogenous. We show that the dynamics of capital accumulation and pension system sustainability are totally different depending on the assumption concerning economic openness. Finally, in the long run, resorting to debt financing seems to be a dead end to finance retirement systems.

This paper investigates the consequences of relying on assets accumulated in a defined contribution pension plan compared to an annuity based on salary from a defined benefit plan. Although a defined contribution plan varies with asset returns, it may be more desirable than a defined benefit plan when wage variability and job turnover are adequately considered. It is found that both job separation rates and wage variance increased in the 1990s. The new calibrations of these variables are used in a life-cycle model where a worker chooses between a defined benefit and a defined contribution plan. It is shown that the increase in job turnover made defined contribution the dominant pension plan.

This paper examines the relationship between funding risk of defined benefit pension plans and both corporate debt ratings and equity risk measures for FTSE100 companies. Panel based models highlighted a direct relationship between pension plan risk and equity risk. Pension risk was also demonstrated to be factored into credit ratings with the analysis highlighting that the greater the pension risk, the greater the probability of obtaining a lower debt rating. From a rating agency viewpoint, this is positive news, particularly at present when agencies are being criticized for a perceived failure to reflect sub-prime mortgage problems in firm-specific ratings.

Many social security systems face high and escalating disability costs. In Chile's new system, the disability assessment procedure includes participation by private pension funds (AFPs) and insurance companies, who finance the benefit, have a direct pecuniary interest in controlling costs and are able to pursue this objective by helping to set criteria and providing countervailing information. We hypothesize that these procedures and incentives will keep costs low, by cutting the incidence of successful claims. Using the Cox proportional hazard model and a retrospective sample of new and old-system affiliates (EPS, 2002), we find that disability hazard rates are only 20–35% as high in the new system as in the old traditional system. Analysis of mortality rates suggests that the new system has accurately targeted individuals with more severe medical problems.

This paper examines the impact of the Senior Citizens Freedom to Work Act of 2000, which abolished the Social Security retirement earnings test for those aged 65–69, on the labor supply of older men using data from the 1996–2004 waves of the Health and Retirement Study (HRS). We use the fine structure of the 2000 Act to develop a new measure of exposure to the earnings test that varies across calendar years both by month and year of birth. We find that much, if not all, of the labor-supply response occurred for sub-groups of men who, either because of high mortality risk, high rates of pure time preference, or liquidity constraints, may have found the actuarial adjustment built into the earnings test relatively disadvantageous, particularly the lesser educated.

With significant under funding of public defined benefit pension plans, public debate often focuses on funding problems, neglecting benefit-side factors that contribute to under funding. In this study we examine the benefit side by calculating the value of deferred compensation, using a unique dataset of salary histories for recent university retirees covered by the Colorado Public Employees Retirement Association plan. We find sizable levels of deferred compensation that is associated with retirement age and period, job class, service years, and to some extent gender, with administrators receiving the highest levels. We also find wage–earning profiles to underestimate salary growth for higher-paid employees.

In this paper we reconsider the idea of an earnings-related pension system with reserves invested in indexed government bonds as a mechanism to both ensure financial sustainability and improve security. The paper starts by reviewing the characterization of the sustainable rate of return of an earnings-related pension system with pay-as-you-go financing. We show that current proxies for the sustainable rate, including the Swedish ‘gyroscope’, are not stable and propose an alternative measure that depends on the growth of the buffer-stock and the pay-as-you-go asset. Using a simple one-sector macroeconomic model that embeds a notional account pension system we then show how GDP-indexed government bonds, if combined with the right measure for the sustainable rate of return on contributions, could be used to generate a sustainable and secure earnings-related pension system, without becoming a fiscal burden. The proposal is particularly attractive for countries considering reforms to earnings-related systems that have accumulated a large implicit pension debt. In this case, the government bonds allow the financing of this debt in a transparent way. The proposed mechanism can also facilitate the transition to a fully funded pension system when the government bonds are allowed to be traded.

Conditional indexation has recently attracted interest with pension funds that are looking for a middle way between defined benefit and defined contribution. In this paper, we analyze conditional indexation schemes from a life-cycle investment perspective. Welfare analysis is applied to investigate the performance of such schemes relative to alternative investment strategies such as fixed-mix policies. We carry out this analysis in the context of a broad family of utility functions, which takes into account the possible presence of two benchmark levels corresponding to a minimum guaranty and to full indexation, respectively. For the purpose of comparability, we construct a self-financing continuous-time implementation of the conditional indexation scheme. The implementation involves continual adjustment of the parameters of the contingent claim representing final payoff. Our findings indicate that, in situations where large weight is placed on the benchmark levels, conditional indexation is fairly close to being optimal.

Administrative and investment costs per participant appear to vary widely across pension funds. These costs are important because they reduce the rate of return on the investments of pension funds and consequently raise the cost of retirement security. This article examines the impact of determinants of these costs, such as the size, governance, pension plan design and outsourcing decisions, using data on all Dutch pension funds across the 1992–2004 period, including more than 10,000 observations. We find that economies of scale dominate the strong dispersion in both administrative and investment costs across pension funds. Industry-wide pension funds are significantly more efficient than company funds and other funds. The operating costs of pension funds' defined contribution plans are lower than those of defined benefit plans. Higher shares of pensioners make funds more costly, whereas the reverse is true when relatively many participants are inactive.

This paper deals with two issues concerning the effects of population aging on education decisions in the presence of a PAYG pension system: We first analyze the effects of an aging population per se on individual skill choices and continuous education and the production structure. Second, we study the implications of postponed retirement, which is often proposed as a measure to cope with the economic challenges of increased longevity. Our study uses a dynamic general equilibrium framework with overlapping generations and probabilistic aging. The model allows for capital–skill complementarity in the production of final output.

As a response to population aging, in a small open economy with a fixed interest rate, our first simulation shows that GDP is depressed due to an adverse effect on skill choice and labor supply. We then introduce postponed retirement as a potentially dampening policy measure due to its encouragement of human capital formation. However, since there is less private saving in this scenario, the overall effect on GDP is even worse than in the pure aging scenario.

This paper estimates the risks of financial distress in UK universities, and uses these estimates to examine the basis of the annual levies paid to the UK's Pension Protection Fund by the Universities Superannuation Scheme, a multi-employer scheme covering 391 universities and related institutions. The paper compares the payments between the two alternative participating arrangements for multi-employer pension schemes to the PPF, namely last-man-standing and segmented levies. Using an Ohlson (1980) logit model to predict the financial distress risk for HE institutions, we find that financially distressed institutions are smaller, with higher leverage and lower earnings. By comparing the implied financial distress probabilities from the PPF risk-based levy using USS accounts with the simulated probabilities using our logit model, we estimate whether USS levies are fairly priced. Our estimates suggest that in 2006/07 USS member institutions appeared to be paying less than the fair risk-based levy. However, this is because during the initial phase of the PPF the risk-based levies were much lower as a proportion of the total levy than the intended steady-state values. The implication is that if USS had paid the same total levy but where the risk-based component was four fifths of the total, then USS would have been paying substantially more than its fair risk-based levy. In addition, by looking at the distributions of individual university risk-based levies under a segmented PPF arrangement, we find evidence of significant cross-subsidies under the current last-man-standing levy between participating USS institutions.

Evidence is presented for a model in which wage growth is positively correlated with equity returns after a time lag of 1–3 years. This model is used to derive the risk premium on an asset which provides a cash flow linked to final salary. Using historic UK data, it is estimated that this risk premium is 0.5% per annum, a much smaller figure than that normally assumed for the equity market. This result has implications for the discount rate that should be used to derive the fair value of final salary pension liabilities.

Economic and demographic slowdown has put under strain public pension systems around the globe. In this paper, we discuss the characteristics of the Greek social security system and investigate the issue of pension fund management. Our empirical analysis focuses on whether flexible investment rules (including equity investment) could have taken the pressure off the Greek public pension system while reducing the risks associated with such flexibility. The empirical results of the paper suggest that efficient management of reserves can result in additional significant revenues at acceptable levels of financial risk. However, pension fund management flexibility cannot by itself resolve the problem of social security system.

The Thrift Savings Plan (TSP) is the defined contribution pension plan for the employees of the US Federal Government. It is also mentioned as a model to implement private investment accounts as part of US Social Security reform. The TSP has one unique investment opportunity – the Government Securities Investment Fund. This ‘G Fund’ is a short-term asset which pays long-term rates. This provides an implicit subsidy to federal employees. To collect this subsidy, however, employees must alter their portfolios. The subsidy may therefore be an inefficient means of compensating federal employees. Within a social security system, however, the G Fund would present the opportunity to partially ‘opt out’ of a private investment account.

The solvency crisis in 2001–2004 urged Dutch pension funds to reconsider their final-pay plans with de facto unconditional indexation. Most pension funds switched to an average-wage plan with solvency-contingent indexation. This pension plan redesign was the outcome of a new compromise between the major stakeholders of Dutch pension funds. The redesign is of interest as it results in a hybrid combination of DB and DC. This new setting indeed greatly improves solvency risk management. Moreover, the new plan structure appears to be welfare-dominant compared to other collective plan settings and individual alternatives, as it improves the conditions for intergenerational risk sharing. However, drawbacks of the new plans are the lack of transparency and potential welfare loss for individuals because of the inherent contingent claim structure of the new plan. Moreover, the plan redesign has led to value redistribution from older to younger plan participants.

After 2000, the vast majority of defined benefit (DB) pension plans encountered a decrease in their funding ratios, largely due to a drop in asset prices. It is possible that public sector pension plans may have acted imprudently by chasing returns, once they encountered underfunding. We identify four indicators for DB plans' imprudent investment behavior: no portfolio rebalancing, employer conflicts of interest, trustee conflicts of interest, and failure to implement best investment practices. To see if public sector pension plans rebalance their portfolios, we use data from the Federal Reserve's Flow of Funds, dating from 1952 to 2007. To test for the remaining three hypotheses, we use data from the Census' State and Local Government Employee Retirement Systems data base, where consistent data for state and local government plans are available from 1993 to 2005. Our results suggest that there is no evidence that public sector plans systematically engaged in imprudent investment behavior and that this did not systematically differ after 2000 from the earlier period.

This study quantifies the possible consequences to stakeholders of reforms to the excise tax on reversions of excess pension assets. Under the US Pension Protection Act (PPA) of 2006, funding in defined benefit (DB) plans is likely to improve significantly. Many plans may become overfunded over time, owing to the shortfall amortizations mandated by the PPA, as well as to precautionary contributions by sponsors and to plan investment returns. This analysis shows that a more moderate excise tax rate together with a reasonable funding threshold for asset reversions would not only enable sponsors to spend the excess funds on other corporate needs, thereby lowering the cost of sponsorship of DB plans, but also would open a considerable revenue source for the government, with only a small increase in bankruptcy cost for the PBGC. Plan participants could also gain in an alternative reform, which would require a partial transfer of excess assets to them along with a still-lower reversion tax rate. These findings also hold for plan sponsors with various degrees of risk tolerance or only making the PPA-required minimum contributions.

As life tables continue to lengthen, a world-wide paradigm shift to defined contribution – but undefined rewards – has left pensioners exposed to performance, credit, and longevity risk. However, relatively risk-free defined benefit schemes can be designed off the back of high-grade debt issuance programmes by public long-term asset vehicles, as an infrastructure–retirement double play. Derivatives can be used to enhance coupons and to correctly align risk preferences as between income while still alive and bequests. Variable lifetime reinvested coupon options and annuity swaps utilize market pricing to provide unambiguous pricing benchmarks and a necessary underpinning of lifecycle planning certainty. The result is a flexible mix of private and public provision of old age income assurance, one that exploits the externalities of a well-designed system of public debt.