We use a historical experiment to test whether U.S. corporate defined benefit pension plans strategically use regulatory freedom to lower the reported value of pension liabilities, and hence required cash contributions. For some years, pension plans were required to estimate two liabilities -...

Both the impacts of financial incentives and health on transitions into retirement and inactivity by older workers have been studied extensively in a variety of contexts but far less is known about their interaction. Guided by the option value framework, we use Spanish data from the European...

We investigate inattention on the part of pension plan participants using a novel dataset covering savings in Sweden's Premium Pension System, data that permit direct comparison of the investment behaviors of pension and retail mutual fund investors. Unlike retail mutual fund investors, pension...

We analyze expectations of the Dutch population of ages 25 and older concerning the future generosity of Dutch state and occupational pensions, the two main pillars of the Dutch pension system. Since the summer of 2006, monthly survey data were collected on the expectations of Dutch households...

This paper examines the impact of participants' age distribution on the asset allocation of Dutch pension funds, using a unique data set of pension fund investment plans for 2007. Theory predicts a negative effect of age on (strategic) equity exposures. We observe that pension funds do indeed...

When it comes to estimating the benefits of long-term savings, many people rely on their intuition. Focusing on the domain of retirement savings, we use a randomized experiment to explore people's intuition about how money accumulates over time. We ask half of our sample to estimate future...

In 1995, the Social Security Administration started sending out the annual Social Security Statement. It contains information about the worker's estimated benefits at the ages 62, 65, and 70. I use this unique natural experiment to analyze the retirement and claiming decision making. First, I...

This paper investigates the international spillovers of government debt and the associated risk of inflation within a monetary union when countries have different pension systems. I use a stochastic two-country two-period overlapping-generations model, where one country has PAYG pensions and the...

The paper provides a perspective on the development of the Belgian disability insurance system. Using both survey and administrative data, it sketches a picture of the (changing) factors leading towards disability, as well as the outcomes in terms of program participation. The paper shows the...

Using Italian data, we estimate an option value model to quantify the effect of financial incentives on retirement choices. As far as we know, this is the first empirical study to estimate the conditional multiple-years model put forward by Stock and Wise (1990). This implies that we account for...