Why Women Have Lower Retirement Savings: The Australian Case

This study provides empirical evidence of the gender gap in retirement savings trajectories using a large longitudinal Australian database. The persistent trend of retirement income policy over recent decades has been to place responsibility for retirement savings accumulation with the individual employee. These plans are fundamentally linked to employment conditions and individual choices, which shape retirement savings trajectories and outcomes. Australia has a mature compulsory system and thus provides insight for countries embarking on similar paths. This study shows that the gender gap in retirement savings is observable from early on in an individual’s paid working life and persists over time, providing evidence that women are disadvantaged early in their careers, with few signs of improvement. Men, in contrast, are overrepresented in the upper quartile of growth in retirement savings. This study provides important empirical evidence for policymakers concerned with gender differences in retirement outcomes.     

Reinforcing the Link Between Contributions and Pensions: The Effect of the Population Aging

In this paper, we analyze a majority voting process on the earnings-related part of pension benefits in a Social Security system with flexible retirement. We show that the aging of the population may make it easier to implement one of the proposed reforms to achieve a delay in the average retirement age of workers, to reinforce the link between contributions and pensions.     

Pensions for Singles and Couples

Retirement policies often seek to set pensions at levels that enable single and married pensioners to have the same standard of living. The existing literature on consumer equivalence scales provides little assistance in reaching this policy objective, as the estimated scales are both imprecise and reliant upon strong and opaque assumptions. This paper proposes an alternative modeling strategy which has low data requirements and involves the use of detailed, but transparent, assumptions about the extent of joint consumption of particular commodities. These assumptions are embedded in an economic model of household consumption and combined with household expenditure data to calculate consumer equivalence scales. It is estimated that, in 2003–04, Australian couples of Age Pension age who owned their own home needed expenditures between 1.32 and 1.60 times that of a single person. These scales were lower than those used in the pension system.     

居家养老型住宅改造与设计研究

完善养老保障模式与改善老年人生活质量，是应对我国人口老龄化快速发展的一项战略目标。老年人居家养老对居住条件以及居家养老型住宅有一定的要求，如地面的平坦型和防滑性，房屋的合理布局等。同时，老年人对住宅的位置及社区服务体系建设等需求，则由于收入的不同存在着较大的差异。     

How Much is Transfer and How Much is Insurance in a Pay‐as‐you‐go System? The German Case

Pay-as-you-go pension systems provide insurance against longevity-related old-age poverty and related risks. They are commonly also used as instruments for redistribution. This paper provides several estimates of the insurance and transfer share of the German public pension system. Estimating these shares is important because they are indicative of taxation-related deadweight losses and influence public acceptance of the pension system. We also disentangle intragenerational from intergenerational transfers. Although our estimate of intragenerational transfers is smaller than recent semi-official estimations, such transfers create substantial deadweight losses. Intergenerational transfers are much larger, thereby contributing to strong negative participation incentives for the younger generation.
JEL classification : H 55; J 26     

退休年龄选择机理：基于人力资本与社会保障的视角

近年来,延长退休年龄问题日益成为社会和学界的热点话题。本文从我国人口老龄化社会的到来并渐近达到峰值谈起,指出人口老龄化趋势、人均寿命的延长以及我国人口平均人力资本存量的不断增加要求我们实行延迟退休制度。     

Early Retirement and Economic Incentives

In Norway, early retirement programmes have gradually reduced the retirement age from 67 to 62 for a majority of the labour force. Based on micro data for 1990 and 1992, we estimate a competing-risk model with three states: full retirement, partial retirement/part-time work and full-time work. We then use the estimated model in simulations to study how financial incentives can be strengthened to extend working life. Financial incentives, educational background and industry affiliation are found to influence retirement behaviour. For low and medium incomes, the tax system shifts the incentives heavily towards early retirement and, in particular, towards partial retirement combined with part-time work.     

Retirement Expectations and Satisfaction with Retirement Provisions

This paper investigates the relationship between subjective expectations regarding the replacement rate of income at retirement and several measures of pension satisfaction. We use panel data on Dutch employees, analyzed with fixed effects models, allowing for correlation between unobserved heterogeneity in satisfaction and optimism or pessimism in expectations. The level of the expected replacement rate is found to be positively related to satisfaction: respondents who revise their expectations of the level of their replacement rate upwards tend to become more satisfied with their pension provisions, in particular with the level of the expected benefits. We do not find robust evidence for a relationship between uncertainty and pension satisfaction.     

Efficient Timing of Retirement

This study introduces a retirement decision into the classic Merton model. A familiar result is that you should retire if and when the marginal utility of another year's wages is equal to the disutility of work. A new result is that at the point of retirement your exposure to risky assets should not jump. Under power utility and constant time preference, the retirement timing problem has a closed form solution; the nine inputs to the formula in question give rise to nine comparative-static results on retirement timing. Further specialization of preferences, to log consumption utility and zero time preference, reduces the required number of inputs to four. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: E21, G11, J26.     

高校教师对延迟退休年龄意愿的实证研究——基于成都市高校教师的调查

通过PPS抽样从成都市随机抽取了九所高校,并就其专任教师对延迟退休年龄的意愿进行了问卷调查,得到影响成都市高校教师退休意愿影响因素的数据,建立了二维选择logistic回归模型。是否延迟退休年龄的主要影响因素为性别、收入、和身体健康状况。对赞成延迟退休教师的意愿退休年龄进行了分布检验,发现其服从正态分布,并预测出赞成延迟退休的男教师意愿退休年龄为64-65岁,女教师的意愿退休年龄为61-62岁。     

Informal Caregiving and the Retirement Decision

The probability of providing informal care grows with one's own age. While labor market effects due to caregiving are moderate, they could be concentrated in the years close to retirement. Therefore, I investigate whether care in the previous year leads to retirement in the year after by using German Socio‐Economic Panel data from 2001 to 2009 and discrete‐time hazard models. The effect of care on the retirement decision is indeed much higher than its effect on the labor or working hours of middle‐aged individuals. Women are affected to a larger extent but the retirement decision of men also reacts to their caregiving obligations.     

Retirement and Grandchild Care in Urban China

ABSTRACT

This study estimates the causal effect of retirement on grandchild care in urban China. It utilizes the exogenous variations in retirement status caused by China’s mandatory retirement-age policy. Drawing on the data of individuals close to retirement age from the 2011 and 2013 waves of the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS), the analysis shows a statistically significant increase of 29 percentage points in the provision of grandchild care after the transition to retirement for women and a 21 percentage-point increase for men. Moreover, the study finds that grandchild care is demand driven for men and supply driven for women. It also finds that women with lower education levels have a lower probability of retirement after reaching eligible age but are more likely to provide grandchild care after retirement.     

Retirement and health services utilization in a low-income country*

We estimate the causal effects of retirement on health services utilization in Vietnam. Using authorized retirement ages as instruments for exogenous changes in retirement, we find positive and strong effects of retirement on outpatient health services in the public health sector. Retirement increases the probability of an outpatient visit by 51 percentage points for males and 36 percentage points for females, and the frequency of outpatient visits by 1.4 times for males and 2 times for females. However, we find no effect on the use of public inpatient services as well as private health services.     

Aging,Savings, and Public Pensions in Japan*

We analyze the impact of population aging on Japan's household savings rate and on its public pension system and the impact of that system on Japan's household savings rate and obtain the following results: first, the age structure of Japan's population can explain the level of, and past and future trends in, its household savings rate; second, the rapid aging of Japan's population is causing Japan's household savings rate to decline and this decline can be expected to continue; third, the pay‐as‐you‐go nature of the public pension system, combined with rapid population aging, created considerable intergenerational inequities and increased the savings rates of cohorts born after 1965, which in turn slowed the decline in Japan's household savings rate; and fourth, the 2004 public pension reform alleviated the intergenerational inequities of Japan's public pension system somewhat but will in the long run exacerbate the downward trend in Japan's household savings rate.     

人口红利转变、老龄化与提高退休年龄

中国人口生育水平的下降和平均预期寿命的延长,导致原来的人口红利出现了转变的趋势,也造成了老龄化负担的加剧。在这种情况下,实行提高退休年龄的政策具备了某种可能性,因为人口红利的逐渐消失和劳动力供求的逆转可能成为提高退休年龄的推力,而养老金制度的老龄化危机则成为提高退休年龄的拉力。在现实条件下,考虑这一政策对城镇就业的冲击以及劳动力异质性的影响,应该实施渐进缓慢、逐步提高退休年龄的政策。     

Optimal Retirement with Increasing Longevity

We develop an optimizing life‐cycle model of retirement with perfect capital markets. We show that longer healthy life expectancy usually leads to later retirement, but with an elasticity less than unity. We calibrate our model using data from the US and find that, over the last century, the effect of rising incomes, which promote early retirement, has dominated the effect of rising lifespans. Our model predicts continuing declines in the optimal retirement age, despite rising life expectancy, provided the rate of real wage growth remains as high as in the last century.     

Post‐Fordism and Population Ageing

Two features of recent economic experience have been the transition to post‐Fordism and the ageing of populations. Post‐Fordism entails diverse production and consumption, flexible employment, privatisation and a smaller welfare state. Population ageing is predicted to cause financial problems for state pension schemes and could provoke an ageing crisis. Although post‐Fordism and population ageing have similar expected consequences, with a stress on welfare retrenchment, they have been discussed as separate topics and few connections have been made between them; the present paper aims to bring them closer together and consider how they are related. Post‐Fordism could be seen as resolving the ageing crisis and offering people better work and retirement choices in a new, post‐Fordist life course, but this version of events is questionable. An alternative view is that post‐Fordism and the ageing crisis are symptoms of the general movement towards privatisation and laissez faire, which is by no means guaranteed to improve the welfare of older people.     

生育政策调整、退休年龄延迟与城镇职工基本养老保险最优缴费率

文章基于“十三五”规划建议提出适当降低社会保险费率的现实背景,从社会福利最大化视角,运用一般均衡模型对五种生育情景下不同退休年龄的城镇职工基本养老保险最优社会统筹缴费率进行测算,并分析降低社会统筹缴费率的经济效应。研究表明：（1）最优社会统筹缴费率随退休年龄的延长而下降,随人口增长率的上升而提高。0％－100％符合全面二孩政策规定的妇女生育二孩,使退休年龄为60岁时的最优社会统筹缴费率降到191．8％－196．3％,使退休年龄为65岁时的最优缴费率降到107．7％－116．4％。（2）除了受生育政策和退休年龄影响外,最优社会统筹缴费率对物质资本产出弹性、个人主观效用贴现因子和社会贴现因子的敏感性也较强。（3）降低社会统筹缴费率具有积极的经济效应,不仅能促进经济增长和增进社会福利,而且有助于完善我国多层次养老保险体系。因此,文章为降低城镇职工基本养老保险社会统筹缴费率的改革提供了依据。     

Pensions,Ageing and Retirement in Australia: Long‐Term Projections and Policies

Australia's retirement income provision system, comprising the ‘three pillars’ of a means‐tested aged pension, mandatory occupational superannuation and other, voluntary long‐term savings, is at the heart of understanding the fiscal implications of ageing. While the Intergenerational Report, an account of long‐term fiscal sustainability, is celebrating its tenth birthday since the first edition was published, the Superannuation Guarantee, first implemented in 1992, turns a sprightly 20 years old. This article considers the Intergenerational Report as a prism for studying fiscal, demographic and policy developments in the Australian retirement income system over the last decade and into the future.