SAVINGS IN TIMES OF DEMOGRAPHIC CHANGE: LESSONS FROM THE GERMAN EXPERIENCE

Pension reforms in many developed countries make individuals shoulder a bigger share of longevity and income risks. The desired response is that individuals accumulate private assets for retirement. Whether this actually takes place, is of paramount relevance for scientists and policy makers. We take Germany as an example: Twenty years of pension reform have transformed the monolithic German pension system into a multipillar system. Formerly generous public pension benefits are gradually being reduced, whereas substantial incentives are granted to occupational and private saving schemes. Has this transition worked out? We survey the reform steps and households’ reactions: How did individuals adjust their labor market behavior? How did private and occupational pension plans take off? How do behavioral adjustments vary in the population? Most Germans adapted to the new situation. Both actual and expected retirement decisions changed and the share of households without supplementary pensions decreased from 73% to 39% in little more than a decade. This is a remarkable success. Nonetheless, households with low education, low income and less financial education did neither adjust their retirement behavior nor pick up supplementary pension plans and are thus likely to face difficulties in bridging the gap arising in future pension income.     

The effects of pension rights and retirement age on training participation: Evidence from a natural experiment

This paper uses a natural experiment approach to identify the effects of an exogenous change in future pension benefits on workers' training participation. We use unique matched survey and administrative data for male employees in the Dutch public sector who were born in 1949 or 1950. Only the latter were subjected to a major pension reform that diminished their pension rights. We find that this exogenous shock to pension rights postpones expected retirement and increases participation in training courses among older employees, although exclusively for those employed in large organizations.     

FLEXIBLE RETIREMENT

Flexible retirement – that is, the opportunity to choose one's own personal retirement age – is a hedge against pension risk and provides insurance to workers facing health or productivity shocks. Flexible retirement and flexible pension schemes are in practice closely linked because of imperfect capital markets and institutional restrictions. I discuss three necessary conditions to provide insurance through flexible retirement. First, it should be possible to adjust the pension starting date at limited cost. This condition is gradually being fulfilled, as many countries are moving toward more actuarially neutral pension schemes. Second, individuals should be willing to adjust their labor supply in case of a wealth shock. This condition seems largely fulfilled, although the available empirical evidence suggests that the ‘standard retirement age’ is at least as important as the income effect. Third, the labor market should be able to deal with flexible individual retirement decisions. This condition is gaining importance, but has not yet received much attention in the literature. Institutions often hamper employment past the ‘standard retirement age’. Moreover, the hiring rates of older workers are low and their unemployment duration is high. Institutional reforms facilitating flexible retirement opportunities are desirable from an insurance perspective.     

Individual Differences in Attractiveness of Jobs Based on Compensation Package Components

The primary purpose of the present study was to examine the effect of salary level, amount of leave per year, the extent of cost-sharing for health care insurance coverage, and type of retirement plan on individuals’ job choice within a United States employment context. Salary, amount of vacation time, cost of health insurance, and type of retirement plan predicted the likelihood that individuals would apply for a position as well as accept the position if it were offered to them. While the type of retirement plan had an effect, there was virtually no difference based on whether the retirement plan was a defined benefit pension plan, a 401 K plan, or a company stock plan. There were no interactions between compensation plan components suggesting recruits do not consider salary as a substitute for benefits. Marital status, benefit history, attitudes towards earnings, and risk propensity predicted the relative importance placed on salary and specific benefits in the compensation package.     

The importance of financial incentives on retirement choices: New evidence for Italy

This study exploits a new dataset to quantify the effect of financial incentives on retirement choices. This dataset contains—for the first time for Italy—information on seniority. The effects of marginal incentives and social security wealth (SSW) on retirement go in the expected direction; when employees become eligible for pension benefits, the change in financial incentives they experience is so great that their retirement probability increases by 30 percentage points.We also find that the procedure used in previous Italian studies to impute seniority leads to a considerable overestimation of that variable and of SSW. We show that, due to these measurement errors, the estimate of the SSW coefficient takes the wrong sign. A comparison of retirement studies across countries (see Gruber and Wise [Gruber, J., and Wise, D., (2004). Social Security Programs and Retirement Around the World: Micro-Estimation, NBER. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London.]) provides prima facie evidence that a lack of good quality data often leads to wrongly signed estimates of the SSW coefficient.     

Pensions: theories of underfunding

The widespread underfunding of private defined benefit pensions has generated concern over the viability of employers' promises of retirement benefits. Years ago, similar concerns led to the creation of pension benefit insurance plans by governments in the United States and a number of other countries. This paper studies the causes of underfunding in an environment without pension benefit insurance. We find that the optimal level of retirement benefits will be offered and fully funded if the employer has sufficient internal funds or is able to borrow all it needs. If loans are not enforceable, an employer with limited resources will generally underfund pensions. Further, if pension investments earn lower returns than other investments, pensions will be underfunded. Thus, the paper highlights the link between financial markets and the underfunding of pensions.     

Una applicazione dell'approccio multistato ai fondi pensione

La modellistica multistato ha avuto recentemente significative applicazioni nelle assicurazioni di persone ed è stata impiegata anche nello studio di problemi connessi a schemi previdenziali (per questi ultimi si vedano ad esempio i lavori di Amsler, Wilkie, Linnemann). In questa nota si propone una applicazione di tale approccio all'assicurazione di invalidità — vecchiaia — superstiti nel tempo continuo, sia nel caso in cui si lavori con cause di eliminazione permanente che temporanea.

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Summary Recently the mathematics of multistate models has significantly been applied to the insurance of persons and has also been employed in the study of problems connected with pension schemes (e.g. papers written by Amsler, Wilkie, Linnemann). In this paper we suggest a time-continuous application of this approach to a pension scheme providing retirement, disability and death pensions, considering causes of permanent as well as temporary decrement and assuming the probabilistic structure is that of a time-inhomogeneous Markov process. Moreover, the paper presents the formulae of the expected present value of contributions and of benefits. In this regard, some approximate formulae are proposed for the above mentioned values.

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Ricerca finanziata con fondi 60% MURST. L'intero lavoro è frutto di una collaborazione che riguarda ogni parte del medesimo. I contributi personali di R. Pelessoni riguardano i paragrafi 2.2, 2.4, 2.5, quelli di M. Zecchin riguardano i paragrafi 1, 2.1, 2.3.     

Australia's retirement income system

This paper reviews the current reforms to Australia's retirement income structure which now incorporates a means-tested age pension, a compulsory retirement enefit system which is fully unded in the private sector and a voluntary savings scheme. This approach has been widely discussed in he international scene and some consider it to epresent an ideal structure. However, a number of fundamental problems remain and these are discussed.     

The behavioral justification for public pensions: a survey

Unfunded public pension systems are primarily justified on grounds that many individuals lack sufficient capacity to appropriately save for retirement. We begin with a review of the known principle that a standard life-cycle/permanent-income consumer who discounts the future at an exponential rate can benefit from an unfunded public pension system only if the internal rate of return exceeds the private rate of return. However, a pay-as-you-go program with a below market internal rate can in fact improve lifetime utility if the consumer misestimates social security benefits, uses a hyperbolic discount function rather than the exponential function, uses a short planning horizon, behaves impulsively, or if a fraction of the population do no saving at all. A literature has consequently arisen to study how severe these behavioral defects need to be in order to justify a pay-as-you-go program. We survey this literature, and we conclude that the results are highly mixed as to whether an unfunded public pension that earns a below-market internal rate of return can be justified on grounds of shortsightedness in model economies. The challenge for this literature is that the conclusions crucially depend on the particular values of the preference parameters that are used in the simulation experiments, and these preference parameters are not observable, nor is there much consensus concerning the values that should be used in simulations. In fact, even when the analysis is confined to a small and reasonable space of the unobservable preference parameters, it is possible to reach nearly any policy conclusion. We offer some guidance for future work in this area.

How are pension integration and pension benefits related?

Pension integration is the ability to allow differentiated pension benefits across earnings groups. In the academic literature, it is often described as a way for firms to reduce pension benefits (and therefore costs). Justified by the requirement that firms pay half of Social Security payments, integrated pensions are typically found to reduce benefits for lower income workers. Data on retirees from the Health and Retirement Study, however, reveal a more complex picture where some individuals receive more benefits when one of their pension plans is integrated, ceteris paribus. Some reasons are discussed why this might be the case.     

What are the determinants and managerial motivations for employee ownership in retirement pension plans?

Using the pension database obtained from Form 5500 from 2000 to 2014, we provide the first comprehensive analysis of the determinants of employee ownership in retirement pension plans. By investigating various motivations simultaneously using the horse racing method, we find that firms with higher idiosyncratic risk, weak governance, a greater marginal tax rate, and greater union intensity are more likely to offer employee ownership. This study provides valuable insights to investors that they should properly understand the impact of employee ownership on the firm and appropriately evaluate firms with employee ownership by taking into account diverse motives.     

An evaluation of the life cycle effects of minimum pensions on retirement behavior

In this paper we explore the effects of the minimum pension program on welfare and retirement in Spain. This is done with a stylized life cycle model which provides a convenient analytical characterization of optimal behavior. We use data from the Spanish Social Security to estimate the behavioral parameters of the model and then simulate the changes induced by the minimum pension in aggregate retirement patterns. The impact is substantial: there is a threefold increase in retirement at 60 (the age of first entitlement) with respect to the economy without minimum pensions, and total early retirement (before or at 60) is almost 50% larger. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Resampling a time-series process: A method of estimating the probabilities associated with alternative plans for protecting pensions against inflation

Any pension protection formula that falls short of complete compensation for inflation has associated with it a time-series of probability distributions of future purchasing power losses. A method of estimating those distributions is proposed and applied. The method is based on the idea of representing inflation as a multivariate time-series process and using a model fitted to historical data to generate a large artificial sample of ‘realized’ inflation sequences by means of a bootstrapping procedure. The purchasing power losses under a given protection plan can then be simulated for each inflation sequence and the sample distributions calculated.     

The Use of Data Envelopment Analysis with Probabilistic Assurance Regions for Measuring Hospital Efficiency

This paper uses Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) for an estimation of the cost efficiency of 70 Danish hospitals. The analysis relates to a cost function based on 483 outputs in combination with a set of probabilistic assurance regions defined by the cost distributions for each output. It is demonstrated that the probabilistic assurance region approach allows for (i) a frontier estimation in the full output space, i.e., no fixed aggregation is required, and (ii) a controlling of the variation in heterogeneity of the output clusters, in casu Diagnosis Related Groups. The likelihood of the estimated efficiency score for a given hospital can be measured based on the sensitivity of the score w.r.t. the probability levels used in the specification of confidence intervals for the probabilistic assurance regions.     

寿命延长与延迟退休：国际比较与我国实证

基于国际比较的视角,探讨人口寿命延长与延迟退休之间的机制关系,分析国际上人口寿命延长与延迟退休的实践。通过对我国人口寿命延长趋势的研究,在一定的精算假设下,测算延迟退休对我国养老金支付压力的影响,并分析经济、制度等因素变动对测算结果的敏感性。结论表明,我国人口寿命延长趋势显著,延迟退休能够有效缓解老金支付压力,但在不同的性别之间有所差异。经济、制度等因素与延迟退休之间具有一定的替代效应,尽管延迟退休是未来我国应对人口寿命延长的必然选择,但目前建立二者的调整机制条件尚未成熟。     

Fiscal cost of demographic transition in Japan

This paper quantifies the fiscal cost of demographic transition that Japan is projected to experience over the next several decades, in a life-cycle model with endogenous saving, consumption, and labor supply in both intensive and extensive margins. Retirement waves of baby-boom generations, combined with a rise in longevity and low fertility rates, raise the old-age dependency ratio to 85% by 2050, the highest among major developed countries, and generate a significant budget imbalance, as the government faces rising costs of public pension and health and long-term care insurance. Preserving the current level of the transfers will require a major increase in taxation. Using consumption taxes to balance the government budget, the tax rate reaches the maximal value of 48% in late 2070s. A pension reform to reduce benefits by 20% results in a peak tax rate of 37%, which can be reduced further to 28% if the retirement age is also gradually raised by 5 years.     

The timing of retirement — New evidence from Swiss female workers

We investigate the responsiveness of individual retirement decisions to changes in financial incentives. A reform increased women's normal retirement age (NRA) in two steps from age 62 to age 63 first and then to age 64. At the same time retirement at the previous NRA became possible at a benefit discount. Since the reform affected specific birth cohorts we can identify causal effects. We find strong and robust behavioral effects of changes in financial retirement incentives. A permanent reduction of retirement benefits by 3.4% induces a decline in the age-specific annual retirement probability by over 50%. The response to changes in financial retirement benefits varies with educational background: those with low education respond most strongly to an increase in the price of leisure.     

延长退休年龄能降低个人账户养老金的财政补助吗？

本文运用精算模型发现,当女性退休年龄延长至60岁,2039年及以前个人账户养老金的财政补助较现行政策下降0.3%至9.83%,但2040年及以后上升0.44%至4.67%;当男女退休年龄延长至65岁和60岁,2037年及以前财政补助较现行政策有所降低,但2038年及以后不断提高;当男女退休年龄均延长至65岁,2040年及以前财政补助较现行政策有所减少,但2041年及以后不断增加;即使改变任一参数设置,类似情况仍会出现。所以,延长退休年龄只能减少25至28年个人账户养老金的财政补助,之后政府负担逐年加重。     

The effect of disability pension incentives on early retirement decisions

I investigate the incentive effects of disability pensions on disability retirement entry as a special type of early retirement. The implicit tax rate on further work is included as a forward looking incentive measure. A substantial change of the disability pension legislation caused exogenous variation in disability benefits in Germany in 2001 and is used to obtain estimates of individual's responses to financial incentives. Benefit levels appear to have no effect on the labour market behaviour. At the same time, there is a sizable and significant disincentive effect of implicit taxes on labour market income, indicating that alleviating such disincentives would likely increase labour force participation. Since the response to financial incentives occurs mainly among those in good health, such a policy might on the other hand imperil the aim of providing insurance against a health‐induced loss of one's working capacity.     

Herding in the strategic allocations of Spanish pension plan managers

This paper empirically examines herding behavior in the strategic style allocations of Spanish pension plan managers. The study uses both the standard metric used in financial literature to capture institutional herding and a new approach to address some shortcomings of this traditional measure. Concretely, some authors have highlighted that the traditional measure does not take into account that the probability that a manager buys rather than sells a certain stock depends on both the initial holding in the stock and the asset flows. As a consequence, this study proposes a new approach, which can be applied to other financial markets and provides more accurate values of the probability to increase (or decrease) the style exposures bearing in mind the previous exposure of each portfolio. The study confirms the existence of herding behavior by using both methods. Although the strength of this behavior decreases using the new approach, the herding levels detected in this study of style herding of Spanish pension plans are higher than those of previous research analyzing portfolio holdings in other countries. Additionally, herding levels are higher in periods of low volatility while market returns does not seem to influence herding levels.