BACKGROUND Depression ranges among the leading causes of early exit from the labor market worldwide. We aimed to investigate the associations of socio-demographic factors, sickness absence, health care and prescription patterns with the risk of being granted a disability pension in psychiatric outpatients with depression. METHODS All non-retired patients aged 18-60 years and living in Sweden ...

OBJECTIVES Agriculture has undergone major changes, and farmers have been found to have a high prevalence of depression symptoms. We investigated the risk of work disability in Norwegian farmers compared with other occupational groups, as well as the associations between symptoms of anxiety and depression and future disability pension. METHODS We linked working participants of the HUNT2 Surve...

We model the asset allocation decision of a defined benefit pension fund in the UK using a stochastic dynamic programming approach. Our model recognizes the fact that asset allocation decisions are made by trustees who are mandated to act in the best interests of beneficiaries not by sponsoring employers and that trustees face payoffs that are linked in an indirect way to the value of the under...

OBJECTIVES We examined the risk of disability pension before and after ischaemic heart disease (IHD) or stroke event, the burden of stroke compared with IHD and which factors predicted disability pension after either event. DESIGN A population-based cohort study with follow-up 5 years before and after the event. Register data were analysed with general linear modelling with binary and Poisson...

BACKGROUND Mental depression is an important health problem in many countries. It reduces productivity at work and is the fastest increasing reason for early retirement. METHODS This study followed up a Finnish cohort of 1726 men from 1984 to 2000. Depression was assessed at baseline by HPL depression score. Pension records were obtained from the national pension registers. Cox's regression a...

In this paper the growing salience of what is called ‘pension fund engagement’ is critically assessed by means of a reconstruction of the failure of the Swedish Wage Earner Funds. The outcome of this assessment is sobering. Even under optimal political conditions pension savings proved to be too unwieldy to have any impact on the ownership structure of large publicly quoted corporations. Appare...

Using survey data collected by the Japan Institute of Life Insurance in 2002, this study finds that a significant gender gap existed in defined contribution (DC) pension knowledge among workers employed at small- to medium-sized private firms in Japan. Even with similar DC knowledge, however, men and women reveal different preferences for DC pensions, indicating that their perceptional response...

This paper attempts to provide some empirical evidence on the effects of social security on savings mobilization of households. While it has been empirically established in developed countries that pension system has important effects on savings, no important study has been established yet in the Philippines. Following Feldstein’s model, consumption and savings function using a household survey...

With these laws, the Japanese government raised patient copayments for health care, initiated a preventive health program to monitor the physical well-being of persons over age 40, and introduced resource pooling among all health programs to cover expenditures for the elderly. It also realigned public pension programs to inaugurate a two-tiered system for the nation’s working population, and ma...

Real estate is the most important alternative asset class for pension funds and represents on average more than five percent of their total holdings. We employ a previously unexplored international database to examine the investments of some 880 pension funds in direct real estate and REITs over the 1990-2009 period. We document that larger funds are more likely to invest in real estate interna...