We employ a life-cycle model with income risk to analyze how tax-deferred individual accounts affect households' savings for retirement. We consider voluntary accounts as opposed to mandatory accounts with minimum contribution rates. We contrast add-on accounts with carve-out accounts that...

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 investigate optimal consumption, asset accumulation and portfolio decisions in a realistically calibrated life-cycle model with flexible labor supply. Our framework allows for wage rate uncertainly, variable labor supply, social security benefits and portfolio choice over safe bonds and risky...

We employ a life-cycle model with income risk to analyze how tax-deferred individual accounts affect households' savings for retirement. We consider voluntary accounts as opposed to mandatory accounts with minimum contribution rates. We contrast add-on accounts with carve-out accounts that...

Retirement benefit guarantees can ensure a minimum standard of living in retirement. I propose a framework to discuss the design of such guarantees. The model features a standard life-cycle setting, in which individual agents' choices can have negative external effects on public finances,...

The aim of this paper is to build and estimate a macroeconomic model of credit risk for the French manufacturing sector. This model is based on Wilson's CreditPortfolioView model (1997a, 1997b); it enables us to simulate loss distributions for a credit portfolio for several macroeconomic...

The share of the U.S. population over the age of 65 was 8.1 percent in 1950, 12.4 percent in 2000, and is projected to reach 20.9 percent by 2050. The percent over 85 is projected to more than double from current levels, reaching 4.2 percent by mid-century. The aging of the U.S. population makes...

This paper shows tha shifting the portfolio allocation of the social security trust fund towards more equity investment, ceteris paribus, reduces the aggregate capital stock as well as the average consumption level of all individuals except the poor retirees who receive an increase but at the...

We estimate the effect of pension reforms on households expectations of retirement outcomes and private wealth accumulation decisions exploiting a decade of intense Italian pension reforms as a source of exogenous variation in expected pension wealth. The Survey of Household Income and Wealth, a...

The Treasury has, at times, suggested giving greater consideration to reforms to narrow the Saving-Investment gap. However, there has been less discussion of specific policy options for doing this. This paper helps to fill the gap by asking what policy reforms could help to narrow the...