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...

We use a unique dataset on individual retirement decisions in Swiss pension funds to analyze the choice between an annuity and a lump sum at retirement. Our analysis suggests the existence of an 'acquiescence bias', meaning that a majority of retirees chooses the standard option offered by the...

In the early 1990s, the Dutch social partners agreed upon transforming the generous and actuarially unfair PAYG early retirement schemes into less generous and actuarially fair capital funded schemes. The starting dates of the transitional arrangements varied by industry sector. In this study,...

This paper presents new evidence on how the annuitization decision is affected by changes in the annuity's value. We take advantage of an unprecendented change in policy, which in 2004 moderated the super-mandatory Swiss occupational pension scheme: The 20 percent reduction in the rate at which...

If a consumer wishes to protect her retirement account from the risk of price changes in order to sustain a stable standard of living, then what price index should the account be indexed to? This paper constructs a dynamic price index (DPI) that answers this question. Unlike the existing theory...

When entering retirement most people face the decision whether they would like their defined contribution account balance paid as a lump sum or to annuitize the amount. The fact that people tend to choose the lump sum even if economic reasons suggest not to is called the annuity puzzle. In a...

A worker can contribute pre-tax dollars to a private pension plan. Under a progressive tax, this feature reduces income taxes. Ippolito (1986} argues that an individual in 1979 can reduce lifetime taxes by 20%. We re-examine his analysis using the complete time-series of US income tax history...

An opinion poll on a representative sample of Italian citizens suggests that it does. We focus on reforms that would lengthen retirement age and/or cut pension benefits. After controlling for individual features of the respondent, we find that individuals who are more informed about the costs...

Social insurance for the elderly is judged responsible for the widely observed trend towards early retirement. In a world of laissez-faire or in a first-best setting, there would be no such trend. However, when first-best instruments are not available, because health and productivity are not...