Guarantees are often seen as the key characteristics of pension saving products, but securing them can become costly and is of central relevance especially in the course of the current low interest rate environment. In this article, we deal with the question of how costly the typical types of...

A recent US Treasury regulation allowed deferred longevity income annuities to be included in pension plan menus as a default payout solution, yet little research has investigated whether more people should convert some of the $15 trillion they hold in employer-based defined contribution plans...

We empirically investigate the distributional consequences of the Riester scheme, the main private pension subsidization program in Germany. We find that 38% of the aggregate subsidy accrues to the top two deciles of the population, but only 7.3% to the bottom two. Nonetheless the Riester scheme...