This article offers an overview of the current state of labor markets and pension coverage in a wide sample of Latin America and the Caribbean countries, and proposes a series of possible avenues toward universal coverage, not only as an instrument to fight poverty during old age, but also as part of an agenda for increasing formal employment and productivity growth. We conclude that despite perspectives of low economic growth and reduced fiscal space, the region is going through intense demographic and socio-economic changes, which increase the demand for better jobs and provide a real opportunity for initiating the bold reforms in pensions, labor, and taxes needed to achieve universal coverage.

This paper studies the effects of risk aversion and density of contribution (DoC) on comparisons of proportional charges on flow (contributions) and balance (assets) during the accumulation phase of a defined-contribution pension plan in a system of individual retirement accounts. If the participant's degree of risk aversion increases and both charges yield the same expected terminal wealth, then the charge on balance improves with respect to the charge on flow when performing comparisons that examine the ratio between the resulting expected utilities of terminal wealth. When this methodology is applied to the Peruvian Private Pension System, empirical results demonstrate that the aforementioned result also holds for arbitrary charges on flow and balance and that the effect of DoC on these comparisons is nearly negligible for most of the assessed scenarios.

This special issue on financial knowledge and retirement security builds on prior studies in this journal on the economic causes and consequences of financial literacy for retirement security.

Means-tested retirement benefits create incentives to cash out pension wealth. Individuals trade off the advantages from annuitization, receiving longevity risk insurance, to the disadvantages, giving up ‘free’ wealth in the form of means-tested supplemental income. We quantify the impact of means-tested benefits with a calibrated life-cycle model, demonstrating that they substantially reduce the desire to annuitize especially for low and intermediate levels of pension wealth. Using an administrative dataset on pension choices, we show that the model's predicted fraction of retirees choosing the annuity is able to match the annuitization pattern of occupational pension wealth observed in Switzerland. On the base of our model, we also assess alternative policies such as mandatory annutization and tougher asset tests.

In this paper, we draw on internationally comparable survey evidence on financial literacy and retirement planning in Canada to investigate how financially literate Canadians are and how financial literacy is linked to retirement planning. We find that 42% of respondents are able to correctly answer three simple questions measuring knowledge of interest compounding, inflation, and risk diversification. This is consistent with evidence from other countries, and Canadians perform relatively well in comparison with Americans but worse than individuals in other countries, such as Germany. Among Canadian respondents, the young and the old, women, minorities, and those with lower educational attainment do worse, a pattern that has been consistently found in other countries as well. Retirement planning is strongly associated with financial literacy; those who responded correctly to all three financial literacy questions are 10 percentage points more likely to have retirement savings.

As a result of the two severe stock market declines since 2000, there has been a steady debate about the affordability of state and local public pension benefits. We measured the affordability of pension benefits in terms of governments’ ability to make the required contributions based on existing tax and revenue bases. We conducted a historical analysis of government pension contributions at national and state level over a 20-year period 1992–2011 and found that the real pension burdens have increased over this period. We also found substantial variation in pension burdens among the 50 states. The results of our empirical analysis showed that employee contribution share, investment return, size of the public workforce, and pension benefit level had significant effects on pension burdens. Based on these findings, we proposed several strategies for reducing pension burdens, including increasing employee pension contribution, reducing size of workforce, and improving pension investment performance.

To improve the design of the pay-out phase of DC plans, this paper proposes a new approach to structure pension products: the Personal Pension with Risk sharing (PPR). By unbundling and valuing the investment, (dis)saving, insurance and risk-sharing functions of pensions, PPRs allow risk management and (dis)saving to be customized to the specific features of heterogeneous individuals. Unlike variable annuities, PPRs allow investment risks to be combined with longevity insurance without giving rise to high year-on-year volatility in consumption streams or opaque and rigid valuation and smoothing rules. The synthesis of a PPR structure provides new opportunities for product innovation and for the comparison of retirement products.

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.

Traditionally, collective defined benefit pension schemes have played an important role in the provision of pensions. Various trends such as population ageing put these schemes under serious pressure, however. Whether this is good or bad depends among other things on two factors: one is the value of the risk sharing between generations that is organized by pension schemes, and another is the cost of the distortions of labour supply decisions that these collective schemes imply. This paper constructs a model with overlapping generations of households and a pension scheme to assess the role of these two factors. The paper finds that the welfare gain from intergenerational risk sharing generally dominates the cost of labour supply distortions.

This paper uses a quantitative overlapping generation model to suggest a pension reform able to sustain a retirement system, in the face of deep demographic changes. We derive the reform design from an optimization program that selects one or more policy instruments – and their values – among a predefined set, to minimize the welfare loss of the median voter while keeping sound public finances, sustaining gross domestic product growth and considering the welfare of the newborn generation. We calibrate the model to the Luxembourg economy. The European Commission (2012) forecasts that, among all euro area countries, Luxembourg will experience the largest increase in pension costs between now and 2060. Our simulations show that a single instrument reform would imply severe backlashes on the rest of the economy. The suggested pension reform instead consists of a policy mix including taxation, benefits and the effective retirement age. We stress the need to design pension reforms based on optimization programs that lead to the achievement of desired targets. Indeed, the reform implemented by the Luxembourg government in 2013, which does not result from an optimization program, will not keep public finances sound over the medium term.

We study the complex relationship between financial literacy, retirement planning and trust in financial institutions, using data from the 2010 Bank of Italy Survey on Household Income and Wealth. The impact of financial literacy on retirement planning is a well-established issue in the existing empirical literature; our main contribution is proving that financial knowledge not only impacts retirement planning, but also the decisions of entering a private pension scheme (or devoting the severance pay to a private pension scheme). Adding the consideration of trust poses serious econometric concerns, since both financial literacy and trust in financial institutions are likely to be endogenous and the presence of two endogenous regressors renders the identification of causality very difficult. Our solution is to keep only financial literacy as endogenous and include in our models an exogenous regional indicator of social capital (similar to the one adopted by Guiso et al., 2004), as a proxy for the level of trust between the counterparts of a financial contract in each geographical area. Our main findings show that trust has a positive influence on both the decisions to enter a private pension scheme or to devote the severance pay to a private pension scheme.

We developed and experimentally evaluated four novel educational programs delivered online: an informational brochure, a visual interactive tool, a written narrative, and a video narrative. The programs were designed to inform people about risk diversification, an essential concept for financial decision-making. The effectiveness of these programs was evaluated using the American Life Panel. Participants were exposed to one of the programs, and then asked to answer questions measuring financial literacy – in particular, risk literacy – and self-efficacy. All of the programs were found to be effective at increasing self-efficacy, and several improved financial literacy, providing new evidence for the value of programs designed to improve financial decision-making.

We explore whether investors who are more financially knowledgeable earn more on their retirement plan investments compared with their less sophisticated counterparts, using a unique new dataset linking administrative data on investment performance and financial knowledge. Results show that the most financially knowledgeable investors: (a) held 18% points more stock than their least knowledgeable counterparts; (b) could anticipate earning 8 basis points per month more in excess returns; (c) had 40% higher portfolio volatility; and (d) held portfolios with about 38% less idiosyncratic risk, as compared with their least savvy counterparts. Our results are qualitatively similar after controlling on observables as well as modeling sample selection. We also examine portfolio changes to assess the potential impact of the financial literacy intervention. Controlling on other factors, those who elected to take the financial literacy survey boosted their equity allocations by 66 basis points and their monthly expected excess returns rose by 2.3 basis points; no significant difference in volatility or non-systematic risk was detected before versus after the survey. While these findings relate to only one firm, we anticipate that they may spur other efforts to enhance financial knowledge in the workplace.

Fiscal stress pressures state legislators to either raise taxes or cut spending, but public pensions provide a vehicle to postpone tax increases and maintain current spending. I estimate that states cut their pension contributions at seven times the rate of other spending in response to fiscal stress. The cumulative impact of state undercontributions due to fiscal stress explains about 4% of mid-2008 actuarial underfunding. States not paying actuarially required contributions for reasons other than fiscal stress explains an additional quarter of underfunding. As investment returns explain little underfunding, much underfunding appears due to insufficient employee and actuarially required government contributions to keep up with growing pension liabilities.

This paper analyzes the performance of the Italian defined contribution guaranteed pension funds during the period 2008–2012 through a panel analysis. This paper is organized around three main research questions. The first one is focused on the probability of a guarantee payment in a given year. The second one deals with the determinants of the gap between actual return and minimum guaranteed yield on a yearly basis. The third one focuses on the factors affecting the weight of administrative and management costs and their relationship with the fund dimension.

Social Security provides survivor benefits to lower-earning spouses of deceased workers entitled to a retirement benefit. The value of the survivor benefit depends on a number of factors including the deceased worker's claim age. We use the Health and Retirement Study and a discrete time hazard model to analyze how the claim age of married men influences the likelihood that their spouse will enter poverty in widowhood. We find that delayed claiming is associated with reduction in a widow's poverty risk. The magnitude of this relationship varies significantly with the claim age, Social Security dependence, and survivor benefit dependence.

Using the largest household panel survey Understanding Society, this paper investigates low-income dynamics among pensioner households in the UK controlling for biases due to initial conditions and non-random survey attrition. Estimation results indicate there is a correlation between initial and conditional poverty status, specifically, there is regression towards the mean. The results find no evidence of a correlation between initial poverty status, conditional poverty status and survey attrition. The findings show the importance of benefit income in determining poverty status, suggesting that a dichotomous measure such as poverty status may not suitably reflect actual pensioner living standards. Aside from benefit income, receipt of employer and occupational pension, health, education and subjective financial situation are important in determining initial and conditional poverty status. Stylised examples highlight the significant differences in the ‘poverty experience’ which arise due to differences individual and household characteristics.

We propose a model in which financial sophistication improves portfolio returns and therefore the incentive to substitute consumption intertemporally. The model delivers an Euler equation in which consumption growth is positively correlated with financial sophistication. We test the model's prediction using panel data on consumption and financial sophistication drawn from the Italian Survey of Household Income and Wealth. We find that consumption growth is positively correlated with financial sophistication, as predicted by the model. We also provide estimates of the intertemporal elasticity of substitution in the range between 0.4 and 0.6.

Projected demographic changes in industrialized and developing countries vary in extent and timing but will reduce the share of the population in working age everywhere. Conventional wisdom suggests that this will increase capital intensity with falling rates of return to capital and increasing wages. This decreases welfare for middle aged asset rich households. This paper takes the perspective of the three demographically oldest European nations – France, Germany and Italy – to address three important adjustment channels to dampen these detrimental effects of aging in these countries: investing abroad, endogenous human capital formation, and increasing the retirement age. Our quantitative finding is that endogenous human capital formation in combination with an increase in the retirement age has strong implications for economic aggregates and welfare, in particular in the open economy. These adjustments reduce the maximum welfare losses of demographic change for households alive in 2010 by about 2.2 percentage points in terms of consumption equivalent variation.

We use an overlapping generations model economy with endogenous retirement to study the 2011 and 2013 reforms of the Spanish public pension system. These reforms delay the legal retirement ages, increase the contributivity of the system, and adopt a sustainability factor and a pension revualuation index that effectively transform the Spanish pension system into a defined-contribution pension system. We find that these reforms improve the sustainability of Spanish pensions substantially, and that they limit the tax increases that would have been necessary to finance the pension system deficits. But these results are achieved at the expense of large reductions in the real value of the average pension. This reduction is progressive and, by 2050, the average pension is approximately 30% smaller in real terms than what it would have been under the pension system rules that prevailed in 2010. We also show that these reforms are costly in welfare terms and that households born between 1950 and 1970, young disabled workers who are alive at the time of the reform, and future cohorts bear the highest welfare costs. The substantial reduction of pensions and the high welfare costs that these reforms bring about lead us to conjecture that further reforms lurk in the future of Spanish pensions.