Longevity Risk Management in Singapore's National Pension System

Although annuities are a theoretically appealing way to manage longevity risk, in the real world relatively few consumers purchase them at retirement. To counteract the possibility of retirees outliving their assets, Singapore's Central Provident Fund, a national defined contribution pension scheme, has recently mandated annuitization of workers’ retirement assets. More significantly, the government has entered the insurance market as a public‐sector provider for such annuities. This article evaluates the money's worth of life annuities and discusses the impact of the government mandate and its role as an annuity provider on the insurance market.     

Longevity risk, retirement savings, and financial innovation

Over the last couple of decades unprecedented increases in life expectancy have raised important concerns for retirement savings. We solve a life-cycle model with longevity risk, which can be hedged through endogenous saving and retirement decisions. We investigate the benefits of financial assets designed to hedge the shocks to survival probabilities. When longevity risk is calibrated to match forward-looking projections, those benefits are substantial. This lends support to the idea that such hedging should be pursued by defined benefit pension plans on behalf of their beneficiaries. Finally, we draw implications for optimal security design.     

金融危机对拉美国家私营养老金的影响及经验启示

2008年爆发的金融危机对全球经济产生了重要影响,也对拉美国家私营养老金制度的发展产生了巨大冲击。文章介绍了拉美国家私营养老金制度的改革路径和养老基金概况,从养老金资产价值、投资收益率、投资组合、雇员、制度覆盖面和缴费密度方面切入,分析了金融危机对拉美私营养老金制度的影响。在现状分析的基础上,得出了要保障私营养老金制度可持续运行的一些经验启示:构建多元化的混合型养老金体系,增强退休和养老金支付的灵活性,积极运用生命周期投资策略,实施多元化和分散化投资,以养老金长期收益作为投资目标,建立社会风险应急储备基金和政府担保机制,以及加强员工退休教育。     

基本养老保险制度下女性养老金水平研究——兼析养老金性别差异

基本养老保险制度运行10多年来,在提供退休保障方面发挥了重要的积极作用。但女性养老金问题值得高度重视。其中,女性退休年龄是影响养老金水平的重要因素,还带来了养老金性别差异。女性退休年龄已经与政策目标以及预期寿命不符,对既不利于保障退休生活,也不利于制度的健康持续发展。从国际比较看,我国女性退休年龄低于国际及亚太地区平均水平,而养老金替代率的性别差异也明显大于国际水平。因此,应在统筹考虑我国养老金体系建设的前提下,抓紧研究论证提高退休年龄,特别是先行逐步提高女性退休年龄的方式方法。     

Retirement income decisions: the silent generation speaks

Survey findings indicate that members of the Silent Generation--those born between 1933 and 1945, and perhaps the last ones to rely heavily on a defined benefit pension plan--feel confident that they will have enough money to live comfortably to at least the age of 85. Yet, many are at risk of outliving their retirement assets. They overestimate their Social Security payouts and the likelihood that they will work in retirement, and they underestimate their postretirement expenses, especially health care. Many lack safeguards against overspending and do not understand their longevity risk. The Silents' experiences in preparing for and living in retirement may offer some valuable lessons to be learned by the baby boomers and the generations that follow as they plan for a financially secure future.     

延迟退休年龄、内生生育率与养老金

本文通过构建内生生育率的OLG模型,从微观视角考察了延迟退休年龄对生育率、养老金替代率及其个人养老金收入的影响。研究表明:(1)延迟退休年龄会提高均衡时的生育率水平,但提高幅度非常有限。(2)生育率的提高会增加未来劳动力供给,促进养老金替代率上升和养老金收入增加,而延迟退休年龄延长了养老保险缴费期限,也会促进养老金替代率上升和养老金收入增加;但同时,延迟退休年龄将使得预防性储蓄下降,资本积累降低,工资收入下降,养老金收入降低。因此,延迟退休年龄会使养老金替代率上升。当资本产出弹性大于或等于0.5时,延迟退休年龄会使得养老金收入降低;当资本产出弹性小于0.5时,在平均预期寿命较大或养老保险缴费比例较高的情形下,养老金收入会随着退休年龄的延迟而增加,反之,其会随着退休年龄的延迟而降低。进一步地,将模型拓展到包含人力资本的情形,延迟退休年龄仍会提高均衡时的生育率与养老金替代率。     

Pension reform,retirement, and life-cycle unemployment

This paper investigates the labor market impact of four often proposed policy measures for sustainable pensions: strengthening the tax benefit link, moving from wage to price indexation of benefits, lengthening calculation periods, and introducing more actuarial fairness in pension assessment. We consider the impact on three margins of aggregate labor supply, retirement behavior, job search, and hours worked. We provide some analytical results and use a computational model to demonstrate the economic impact of recent pension reform in Austria. Reducing the distortion in the retirement decision by introducing pension supplements and discounts conditional on the chosen retirement date promises the largest gains. We also find that the pension reform is far from sufficient to offset the fiscal implications of projected demographic change in Austria.     

Downside Risk Management of a Defined Benefit Plan Considering Longevity Basis Risk

To control downside risk of a defined benefit pension plan arising from unexpected mortality improvements and severe market turbulence, this article proposes an optimization model by imposing two conditional value at risk constraints to control tail risks of pension funding status and total pension costs. With this setup, we further examine two longevity risk hedging strategies subject to basis risk. While the existing literature suggests that the excess-risk hedging strategy is more attractive than the ground-up hedging strategy as the latter is more capital intensive and expensive, our numerical examples show that the excess-risk hedging strategy is much more vulnerable to longevity basis risk, which limits its applications for pension longevity risk management. Hence, our findings provide important insight on the effect of basis risk on longevity hedging strategies.     

Pensions and poverty traps: Is saving worthwhile for women?

Present policy means that a private pension, unless it is substantial, may fail to bring financial gain in retirement due to means testing: the pensions poverty trap. This paper examines women's acquisition of private (occupational and personal) pensions and their risk of facing this trap. Because of the loosening link between marriage and motherhood, previous patterns of pension advantage according to marital status are shifting. The employment and pension impact of motherhood varies with socio-economic status but the pension prospects of the majority of women are poor. It is concluded that women's need for financial advice to avoid the pensions poverty trap is greater than men's. An improved basic pension, indexed to national income, would reduce the risk of mis-selling and restore confidence that saving for a pension is worthwhile.     

Management of Portfolio Depletion Risk through Optimal Life Cycle Asset Allocation

Members of defined contribution (DC) pension plans must take on additional responsibilities for their investments, compared to participants in defined benefit (DB) pension plans. The transition from DB to DC plans means that more employees are faced with these responsibilities. We explore the extent to which DC plan members can follow financial strategies that have a high chance of resulting in a retirement scenario that is fairly close to that provided by DB plans. Retirees in DC plans typically must fund spending from accumulated savings. This leads to the risk of depleting these savings, that is, portfolio depletion risk. We analyze the management of this risk through life cycle optimal dynamic asset allocation, including the accumulation and decumulation phases. We pose the asset allocation strategy as an optimal stochastic control problem. Several objective functions are tested and compared. We focus on the risk of portfolio depletion at the terminal date, using such measures as conditional value at risk (CVAR) and probability of ruin. A secondary consideration is the median terminal portfolio value. The control problem is solved using a Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman formulation, based on a parametric model of the financial market. Monte Carlo simulations that use the optimal controls are presented to evaluate the performance metrics. These simulations are based on both the parametric model and bootstrap resampling of 91 years of historical data. The resampling tests suggest that target-based approaches that seek to establish a safety margin of wealth at the end of the decumulation period appear to be superior to strategies that directly attempt to minimize risk measures such as the probability of portfolio depletion or CVAR. The target-based approaches result in a reasonably close approximation to the retirement spending available in a DB plan. There is a small risk of depleting the retiree’s funds, but there is also a good chance of accumulating a buffer that can be used to manage unplanned longevity risk or left as a bequest.     

Human Survival at Older Ages and the Implications for Longevity Bond Pricing

Abstract

Governments are concerned about the future of pension plans, for which increasing longevity is judged to be an important risk to their future viability. We focus on human survival at age 65, the starting age point for many pension products. Using a simple model, we link basic measures of life expectancy to the shape of the human survival function and consider its various forms. The model is then used as the basis for investigating actual survival in England and Wales. We find that life expectancy is increasing at a faster rate than at any time in history, with no evidence of this trend slowing or any upper age limit. With interest growing in the use of longevity bonds as a way to transfer longevity risks from pension providers to the capital markets, we seek to understand how longevity drift affects pension liabilities based on mortality rates at the point of annuitization, versus what actually happens as a cohort ages. The main findings are that longevity bonds are an effective hedge against longevity risk; however, it is not only the oldest old that are driving risk, but also more 65-year-olds reaching less extreme ages such as 80. In addition, we find that the possibility of future inflation and interest rates could be as an important a risk to annuities as longevity itself.     

Demographic change, social security systems, and savings

In theory, improvements in healthy life expectancy should generate increases in the average age of retirement, with little effect on savings rates. In many countries, however, retirement incentives in social security programs prevent retirement ages from keeping pace with changes in life expectancy, leading to an increased need for life-cycle savings. Analyzing a cross-country panel of macroeconomic data, we find that increased longevity raises aggregate savings rates in countries with universal pension coverage and retirement incentives, though the effect disappears in countries with pay-as-you-go systems and high replacement rates.     

Pension de-risking choice and firm risk: Traditional versus innovative strategies

We examine the determinants of firms defined-benefit pension plan de-risking strategy choices and their impact on firm risk. We compile a hand-collected dataset for FTSE 350 firms for the period of 2009–2017. We find that hard freezing and pension buy-ins are more likely to be implemented when pension plans have longer investment horizons. In particular, pension plans that are exposed to higher investment risk are more likely to adopt pension buy-ins. Firms with larger capital expenditure and market capitalization are more likely to utilise innovative de-risking strategies (i.e. buy-in and longevity swap) in addition to traditional strategies (i.e. soft and hard freezing). Financially constrained firms are more likely to implement longevity swap over pension buy-ins. We also find that implementing pension de-risking strategies reduce firm risk. However, the effectiveness varies depending on the strategy with buy-ins having the largest impact in reducing risk.     

Alternative Retirement Income Arrangements and Lifetime Income Inequality: Lessons From Australia

This paper examines the implications for lifetime income equality of alternative retirement income arrangements, using the Australian scheme as a benchmark. In Australia, the pay-as-you go financed age pension is means-tested and thereby provides a contrast with those countries where part or all of a basic pension is paid to all aged persons. Many governments are considering an increase in the level of means-testing. The results show that the introduction of a universal pension coupled with significant changes and simplifications to the structure of taxation and superannuation have little effect on the redistributive impact of the tax structure in a life cycle framework. The presence of means-testing appears to have no significant effect on life-time inequality. The results suggest that it is possible to eliminate complexities from the system providing retirement benefits without having any deleterious effect on equity. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Public Pension Reform in the United Kingdom: What Effect on the Financial Well‐Being of Current and Future Pensioners?*

Unlike many tax and benefit changes, reforms to public pension programmes take many years to have their full effect. This paper examines the effect of reforms to the public pension programme in the United Kingdom on the state retirement incomes of current generations of pensioners and on the prospective state incomes of future generations of pensioners. We show that, for an individual with lifetime earnings close to male average earnings, the UK pension system is at its most generous to those reaching the state pension age around the year 2000, but that the introduction of the state second pension and the pension credit postpones this peak for individuals on lower incomes and for those with substantial periods out of paid employment spent with caring responsibilities. We also consider how the ‘mix’ of benefits, particularly between the contributory and income‐tested sectors, could change over time, and the impact that this would have on incentives to save for retirement.     

退休人口再就业决策的影响因素研究 ——基于中国健康与养老追踪调查数据

夯实财富储备,改善劳动力有效供给是积极应对人口老龄化的重要措施。本文基于中国健康与养老追踪调查数据,全面考察了退休人口再就业的动因,着重分析享受养老待遇和养老待遇水平对退休人口再就业决策的影响。实证结果表明:享受养老待遇对退休人口再就业产生负激励效应;养老待遇水平提高会明显降低退休人口再就业的可能性;个人负债占资产比重越大,退休老年人再就业概率越高;配偶退休、年龄增大、健康状况差会显著降低退休人口再就业概率。对此,本文提出以下建议:适当延迟退休年龄,增加老年人口经济收入;养老保险制度应兼顾保障性和劳动力市场功能;构建老年就业服务体系,保障老年就业权利。     

延迟退休对城镇职工养老保险收支影响的净效应估计——基于2025年起渐进式延迟退休年龄的假设

鉴于延迟退休对养老金收支有多重影响,本文假定2025年起以"每4年延迟1年"节奏,逐步将男(女)养老金正常领取年龄(NRA)从60(55)岁提高至2049年的65(60)岁,利用中国未来分年龄人口数的完整估计数据,估算了延迟退休对城镇职工基本养老保险收支影响的净效应。估算结果显示,延迟退休为2050年争取到了近25%的制度赡养比下降空间,养老压力高峰期大大推迟。无论延迟与否,未来养老金收支缺口规模都很大,但延迟退休对抑制缺口扩大仍有显著效果,特别是在短中期,每年的收支缺口会因此减少40%~70%,但2050年后的远期效果明显减弱。建议尽早实施渐次延迟退休,减少工作退休的强制性,尊重国情允许男女差龄退休;加强养老金财政补贴长期规划,减轻远期财政兜底压力;加强养老金缴费与受益的精算联系,大力提高基金投资效率等。     

Beliefs and actions: expectations and savings decisions by older Americans

To understand the interaction of savings behavior, pension fund participation and expectations of retirement well being, we ask two questions. Are expected pension benefits a substitute for accumulated savings in replacing preretirement income? Are individuals’ expectations concerning their retirement standard of living realistic based on their accumulated savings and pension plan participation? First-wave data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) are analyzed using a probit regression. The results are consistent with the idea that pension benefits are substitutes for saving and that accumulated savings have a significant impact on the expected standard of living but pension plan participation does not.     

European Pension Systems: A Simulation Analysis

Pension systems in different countries vary widely in such aspects as the dependence of benefits on earlier labour income, the minimum permitted retirement age and limits on labour supply after retirement. This paper uses a simulation model of a rational, utility-maximising household facing the detailed pension provisions of eight European countries to study microeconomic distortions induced by the different rules and regulations. We examine in particular the impact on savings, labour supply, retirement age decisions and welfare. JEL classification: H55, J26, J65.     

财政分权如何加剧了养老保险基金失衡?——基于收支二维视角的分析

基金失衡是当前养老保险制度改革面临的困境。本文从财政分权角度构建基金失衡的解释框架,并对其影响效果与作用机制进行实证检验。结果发现,财政分权显著加剧了养老保险基金的失衡风险,在经内生性与稳健性处理后,这一结果依然成立,且财政分权的影响效应主要通过征缴效率和提前退休两个机制实现。具体而言,财政分权诱发地方政府放松缴费监管,导致养老保险缴费收入遭受损失;财政分权引起地方政府降低退休审核,以致职工提前退休现象较为普遍,进而加大了基金支付需求;制度环境对财政分权的两种作用路径具有门槛效应,在基金相对富余、对财政补贴依赖度低以及总体法定费率较高时,财政分权的作用机制更加突显。本文验证了宏观经济体制对养老保险基金运行的影响,深化了对分权体制与养老保险制度关系的理解。