Disability-free life expectancy had been rising continuously in the United States until 2010, suggesting working longer as a solution for those financially unprepared for retirement. However, recent developments suggest improvements in working life expectancy have stalled, especially for minorities and those with less education. This paper uses data from the National Vital Statistics System, the American Community Survey, and the National Health Interview Survey to assess how recent trends, up to 2018, in institutionalization, physical impediments to work, and mortality have affected working life expectancy for men and women age 50, by race and education.

We examine whether an individual's inability to save in the last 12 months affects the extent to which they are concerned about their future financial security and their propensity to plan for retirement. We use an original survey based upon representative samples of working individuals in 16 countries. We show that individuals who were unable to save over the 12-month period prior to the survey are less likely to consider well-being in retirement as their major financial concern. They are also less likely to invest in supplementary pension funds than those who were able to accumulate savings. We provide evidence that these findings are robust under several specifications and are mediated by respondents' perceived income prospects and assessment of their current financial situations.

We examine the behavior of Canadian life annuity prices by measuring how quickly and fully they respond to changes in market interest rates. The price responses, though not immediate, start relatively quickly and become more complete over time. Over the whole sample period, the responses appear to be asymmetric – annuity providers generally raise prices faster when interest rates decline than reduce prices when the opposite occurs, which is disadvantageous to annuity customers. In addition, we find unusual annuity price behavior during the period of the 2008 financial crisis.

This article examines the G-Fund, which is one of the five funds in the federal government employee retirement Thrift Savings Plan. The G-Fund is held as internal debt by the U.S. Department of Treasury. Our examination shows that the fund balance is exclusively composed of 1-day notes that are redeemed/reissued every business day, generating $55 trillion in annual debt reissuance. We also show that the fund balance drops substantially as resources are transferred to the general fund when the government is constrained by a debt ceiling and returns to pre-constraint levels when the ceiling is expanded/suspended.

Pension systems increasingly require active involvement from their participants for retirement planning. This leads to the need for a proper level of financial literacy to foster decision-making. Based on the Chilean Social Protection Survey and the Regional Development Index data, specific characteristics related to the region of residence, such as the quality of life, access to job opportunities, and available connectivity tools, are seen to have a positive impact on pension knowledge. Hence, these regional level results provide inputs to policymakers for developing appropriate policies regarding pension knowledge.

A comparison of the performances of pension products that ignores long-term trends might significantly overestimate the long-term impact of volatility risks while underestimating the impact of persistent, low-frequency trends. This paper proposes a comparison making use of projection models based on the long-term risk–return tradeoff proposed by Campbell and Viceira (2005) to explicitly take into account slow-moving economic trends. In order to illustrate the approach and its implications, we discuss the capital protection provided by life-cycle target-date fund strategies and minimum guarantee strategies.

As the heterogeneity in life expectancy by socioeconomic status increases, many pension systems imply a wealth transfer from short- to long-lived individuals. Various pension reforms aim to reduce inequalities that are caused by ex-ante differences in life expectancy. However, these pension reforms may induce redistribution effects. We introduce a dynamic general equilibrium-overlapping generations model with heterogeneous individuals that differ in their education, labor supply, lifetime income, and life expectancy. Within this framework we study six different pension reforms that foster the sustainability of the pension system and aim to account for heterogeneous life expectancy. Our results highlight that pension reforms have to be evaluated at various dimensions. Reforms that may increase the sustainability of the pension system are not necessarily conducive to reduce the redistributive wealth transfers from short- to long-lived individuals. Our paper emphasizes the need for studying pension reforms in models with behavioral feedback and heterogeneous socioeconomic groups.

The replacement rate (RR) is a quintessential property of pension systems. Yet, current measures of the RR are plagued with problems. We argue that the concept of RR should be based on the replacement of lifetime permanent income rather than pre-retirement income, and we show that the self-financeable RR with respect to the permanent income has the advantage of being independent of labor income (wages and density of contributions). We define an RR measure, called CRR, as the country-level RR of the permanent labor income that the working-age population could buy with their mandatory pension deposits if they stay constant over time. Pension deposits refer to national mandatory contributions plus the fraction of non-contributory pensions whose financing could be attributed to the working-age population, all as a percentage of the gross domestic product. The CRR is easy to compute and interpret, is nationally representative, and provides an international ranking because it is independent of pension rules, GDP, intertemporal and intergenerational redistributions, and sustainability. The application of the CRR to most OECD countries using the available data shows a 65% average across them, with several countries achieving a 100% RR, all mostly due to their high mandatory contributions as a percentage of GDP.