Private pension provision faces the challenging task of providing stable income streams during retirement. The challenge has increased markedly in the last decades due to volatile financial markets, falling interest rates and the withdrawal of employers and external insurers as risk bearers of...

The creeping stock market collapse eroded the wealth of funded pension systems. This led to political tensions between generations due to the fuzzy definition of property rights on the pension funds wealth. We argue that this problem can best be resolved by the introduction of generational...

We examine the activity and performance of a large panel of individual investors (approximately 70,000 investors and their daily returns over the 2000 to 2010 period) in Sweden's Premium Pension System. We document strong inertia in individuals' choices and changes of mutual funds. We find that...

Intergenerational inequality and old-age poverty are salient issues in contemporary China. China's aging population threatens the fiscal sustainability of its pension system, a key vehicle for intergenerational redistribution. We analyze the positive and normative effects of alternative pension...

We explore intergenerational and international risk sharing in a general equilibrium multiple-country model with two-tier pensions systems. The exact design of the funded tier is key for the way in which risks are shared over the various generations. The laissez-faire market solution fails to...

Recent events in several countries have underscored the importance of good governance in private occupational pension plans. The present Paper uses contract theory to analyse the interplay of residual claims and control rights in private pensions. The residual claimant is the plan sponsor in a...

This paper presents a case study on reforming a very dysfunctional labour market with a deep insider-outsider divide, namely the Spanish case. We show how a dual market, with permanent and temporary employees makes real reform much harder, and leads to purely marginal changes that do not alter...

What happens when a previously uncovered labour market is regulated? We exploit the introduction of a minimum wage in South Africa and variation in the intensity of this law to identify increases in wages for domestic workers and find no statistically significant effects on the intensive or...

The increasing literature on the interactions between liberalization-integration of product markets and labour market reforms is often highly speculative and draws on a rather weak empirical basis. Cross-country indicators of regulatory frameworks are often lacking, making it difficult to...

This Paper analyses the welfare effects of price restrictions on private contracting in a world where agents have a limited cognitive ability. People compute the costs and benefits of entering a transaction with an error. The government knows the distribution of true costs and benefits as well...