At present, the question of how national pension or retirement payment systems should be organised is being hotly debated in various countries, and opinions vary widely as to what should be regarded as the optimal design for such systems. It appears to the authors of the present paper that in...

This paper examines how investor and capital flows into mutual funds in the Swedish pension system are related to fund characteristics. Similarly to U.S. studies, we show that individuals chase past returns and have a strong preference for lower-fee funds. However, our results suggest that past...

This paper studies the impact of recent changes in second pension pillars of three Central and Eastern European Countries. The paper seeks to answer the following questions: i) what is the impact on the sustainability of Poland's pension system of the decrease in the pension contribution going...

France has a track record of persistent general government deficits, partly reflecting pro-cyclical fiscal policies in upswings. This has resulted in a quadrupling of its public debt-to-GDP ratio since the 1970s to above 80% of GDP. Reducing public debt is crucial because a high level of public...

This article is the first one to use individual data to analyze the demand for AFP in Chile. This study implements panel data techniques which allow us to estimate the switch probability of an AFP customer. Results confirm the fundamental role of sales agents, which was already suggested by...

Ein häufig genannter Vorschlag zur Reform der gesetzlichen Rentenversicherung (GRV) ist die Ausweitung des Versichertenkreises. Dabei geht es zum einen um die bessere Alterssicherung von bislang nicht Versicherten und zum zweiten um die Stabilisierung der finanziellen Grundlagen der GRV. Dieser...

This paper studies actuarial neutrality in the Austrian pension system. It is often argued that actuarial neutrality constitutes an incentive for people to retire. We show that there are almost no financial incentives within the Austrian pension corridor, when we use the traditional definition...

This paper proposes an overlapping generation model along the lines of the papers by Fanti and Gori (2008). Its objective is to study the effect of demographic shocks on the level pension respectively in the PAYG and funded system within the context of increased life expectancy at long-run.

The present paper estimates the effect over participation outcomes of the new reform to the pension system made in Chile in 2008, using a difference in difference matching estimation. The main results found that the treated group shows a higher withdrawal from the labor market and that they...

Is the economic and financial crisis also a crisis of Economics? From different perspectives, today there is rather harsh criticism of Economics as a Social Science. In this paper, first, some of the recent failures of Economics are discussed. Then some of the criticisms are taken up that are...