This paper provides an answer to an important empirical puzzle in the retirement literature: while most people know little about their own pension plans, retirement behavior is strongly affected by pension incentives. We combine administrative and selfreported pension data to measure the retirement response to actual and perceived financial incentives. We find that wellinformed individuals are ...

This paper investigates the role of basic pensions in alleviating poverty in subSaharan Africa. Using the most recent Senegalese household income-expenditure data survey, we construct scenarios of universal and means-tested basic pension schemes with different generosity levels. Simulations indicate that basic pension benefits have sizeable impact on poverty reduction amongst households, with e...

Employer pensions that integrate benefits with Social Security have been the focus of relatively little research. Since changes in Social Security benefit levels and other program characteristics can affect the benefit levels and other features of integrated pension plans, it is important to know who is covered by these plans. This article examines the characteristics of workers covered by inte...

Despite pension fund managers being largely unconstrained in their investment decisions, this paper reports evidence of clustering in the performance of a large cross-section of UK pension fund managers around the median fund manager. This finding is explained in terms of the predominance of a single investment style (balanced management), the fee structures and incentives operating in the UK p...

This article describes the characteristics of the longest job held by new disabled-worker beneficiaries responding to questions in the 1982 New Beneficiary Survey, conducted by the Social Security Administration in October-December 1982. The characteristics include pension coverage, job duration, employer type, occupation, and industry. Many disabled workers (about half the men and two-fifths o...

The decision by firms to offer an occupational pension is investigated with a unique linked employer-employee dataset, supplemented with detailed actuarial calculations of the cost to the firms of offering occupational pensions and constructed tax gains from pension contributions versus cash wage, driven by lower tax on wages than on pensions. The tax gains which can be shared between employers...

A growing stream of accounting research suggests that managers use the data reported in a company’s financial reports to make real investment decisions. We extend this idea to the public sector, investigating whether the employment decisions made by governmental entities are influenced by the reporting rules for public pensions and the discretion pension managers use in implementing these rules...

Population ageing in Italy is likely to accelerate in the next four decades. Thus, the proportion of the population over 65 years old is projected to strongly increase shifting from 20 per cent in 2010 to 32 per cent in year 2060 (Demographic Projections EUROPOP2010, released in April 2011 by Eurostat). Declining mortality trends, combined with low fertility rates and the approaching to retirem...

BACKGROUND The decision to grant a disability pension is usually the end of a long process of medical examinations, treatment and rehabilitation attempts. This study investigates to what extent the time spent on rehabilitation time prior to disability pension is associated with characteristics of the individual or the local employment and welfare office, measured as municipality variance. MET...

In lowering the age at which a pension is payable from 70 to 67 as of January 1, lQi3, Norway introduced a flexible retirement test that is unique in social security legislation. The new test permits persons aged 67-60 who wish to continue working on a less-than-full-time basis to claim a partial pension if the sum of pension and earnings does not exceed 80 percent of former earnings. A similar...