Working Papers

Jennifer Alonso Garcia, Hazel Bateman, Johan Bonekamp, Arthur van Soest and Ralph Stevens

We investigate the importance of alternative motives for choosing a saving and consumption trajectory after retirement. Using an online experimental survey, we elicit the impact on advised spending patterns and underlying saving motives of alternative retirement drawdown designs, comprising different combinations of annuity income and wealth, and of major life events such as becoming frail or losing a spouse. We find that individuals' saving motives are revised in anticipation of major life events. They are less responsive to variation in `experimental' retirement drawdown arrangements, remaining aligned to prevailing institutional arrangements. Our results suggest that the main explanations for the widespread behaviour of retirees to hold onto their wealth are the desire to hold precautionary savings for health and other unforeseen expenses, facilitating an intra-household bequest, and making it possible to enjoy life now as well as later.

Keywords: consumption smoothing, asset decumulation, saving motives, pension design

Robert Holzmann and John Piggott

Abstract: The quest for better-designed pension schemes and effective pension system reforms has preoccupied policy makers and academic research- ers for the last several decades. The debate has swept across the globe, at times generating strong theoretical and policy arguments and creating reform leaders and followers. The notions of systemic and parametric pension reform that emerged with the debate suggest the depth of pro- posed reforms and the willingness to explore new ones.

Keywords: Pension schemes, pension, policy, taxation, reform 

Bei Lu, John Piggott, and Bingwen Zheng

This chapter discusses the potential expansion of the role of the notional defined contribution (NDC) paradigm in the ongoing reforms of retirement provision in China. China has remarkably high nominal retirement coverage of its population, but issues of sustainability, equity, and governance are challenging and real. Further, while many broad policy guidelines are set by the central government, jurisdictions at provincial, city, and sometimes even district level have major control over implementation, covering administration, benefit rates, and other important retirement policy features.

Elena Capatina, Michael Keane, Shiko Maruyama

This paper studies the effects of health on earnings dynamics and on consumption inequality over the life-cycle. We build and calibrate a life-cycle model with idiosyncratic health, earnings and survival risk where individuals make labor supply and asset accumulation decisions, adding two novel features. First, we model health as a complex multi-dimensional concept. We differentiate between functional health and underlying health risk, temporary vs. persistent health shocks, and predictable vs. unpredictable shocks. Second, we study the interactions between health and human capital accumulation (learning-by-doing). These features are important in allowing the model to capture the degree to which, and the pathways through which, health impacts earnings and consumption patterns. They are also very important in estimating the value of health insurance and social insurance. A key finding is that health shocks account for roughly half of the growth in offer wage inequality over the life cycle. Eliminating health shocks leads to a 5.5% decline in the variance of the present value of earnings across all individuals.

Keywords: Health, Income Risk, Precautionary Saving, Health Insurance, Welfare