We suggest that overconfidence among policymakers explains why formal decision power over monetary policy is given to committees, while much of the real power to set policy remains with central bank chairmen. Overconfidence implies that the chairman underweights advice from his staff, increasing...

Monetary policy decisions are typically characterized by three features: (i) decisions are made by a committee, (ii) the committee members often disagree, and (iii) the chairman is almost never on the losing side in the vote. We show that the combination of overconfident policymakers and a...

Group Self-annuitisation Schemes (GSAs), or Pooled Annuity Schemes, are designed to share uncertain future mortality experience including systematic improvements. They have been proposed because of the significant uncertainty of future mortality improvement on pension and annuity costs. The...

Group Self-annuitisation Schemes (GSAs), or Pooled Annuity Schemes, are designed to share uncertain future mortality experience including systematic improvements. They have been proposed because of the significant uncertainty of future mortality improvement on pension and annuity costs. The...

Since the 2008 global financial crisis, those East European countries that had partly privatized their pension systems in the 1990s or early 2000s increasingly scaled back their mandatory private retirement accounts and restored the role of public provision. What explains this wave of reversals...

In his February 2002 address to the National Summit on Retirement Savings, President Bush asserted that citizens who invested their Social Security contributions in stocks over the past forty-five years would have more than tripled their retirement benefits, and implied that a similar windfall...

Low contribution levels to pension schemes in Latin America are an enormous obstacle limiting the implementation of a broad-based social security system. Contribution rates measured as a ratio of contributors to the total labour force stand at an average of 40%, or 60% in the best of cases....

This paper shows that an uninsured fully-funded defined-benefit (DL) pension is effectively a defined-contribution (DC) pension invested in a special type of fixed-income security, one that imposes a large amount of diversifiable inflation risk on plan participants and that is apparently...

Defined benefit pensions are still an important part of retirement income security for 44 million people. After 2000, these plans experienced extreme difficulties. Although the magnitude of the problem was unprecedented, its causes were not. Interest rate and asset prices decline in a recession,...

Los bajos niveles de cotizacion a los sistemas de pensiones en America Latina son un enorme obstaculo que limita la puesta en practica de un sistema de seguridad social generalizado. Las tasas de cotizacion medidas como el indice de cotizantes respecto a la poblacion activa total se mantiene en...