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We calculate the present value of state employee pension liabilities using discount rates that reflect the risk of the payments from a taxpayer perspective. If benefits have the same default and recovery characteristics as state general obligation debt, the national total of promised liabilities based on current salary and service is $3.20 trillion. If pensions have higher priority than state debt, the value of liabilities is much larger. Using zero-coupon Treasury yields, which are default-free but contain other priced risks, promised liabilities are $4.43 trillion. Liabilities are even larger under broader concepts that account for salary growth and future service.

This paper analyzes various reform options for Japan's public pension in light of large fiscal consolidation needs of the country. The most attractive option is to increase the pension eligibility age in line with high and rising life expectancy. This would have a positive effect on long-run economic growth and would be relatively fair in sharing the burden of fiscal adjustment between younger and older generations. Other attractive options include better targeting by \"clawing back\" a small portion of pension benefits from wealthy retirees, reducing preferential tax treatment of pension benefit incomes, and collecting contributions from dependent spouses of employees, who are currently eligible for pension benefits even though they make no contributions. These options, if implemented concurrently, could reduce the government annual subsidy and the government deficit by up to 1¼ percent of GDP by 2020.

The funding policy for defined benefit pension plans covering government employees represents an important decision for governments sponsoring those plans. Many state and local government plans have become severely underfunded (e.g., New Jersey, Illinois, and Detroit), raising concerns about whether governments are contributing enough to their pensions. Governmental Accounting Standards Board Statements 67/68 (GASB 67/68) fundamentally alter the financial reporting of pension liabilities, by (i) requiring pension liabilities to be estimated using a potentially lower discount rate (increasing estimated liabilities and any funding deficits), and (ii) mandating balance sheet recognition of funding deficits/surpluses. Although GASB 67/68 only change financial reporting and acknowledge specifically that funding is outside their scope, we find, for 100 large state-administered plans, that governments increase pension contributions significantly upon applying GASB 67/68. This funding response is stronger from governments likely to face greater political consequences once pension deficits are made prominent by GASB 67/68. Benefit cuts are also more likely post GASB 67/68, but plans that increase funding are less likely to cut benefits—suggesting that these responses substitute for each other and that pension funding is more of a fiscal priority in some states than others. Overall, our findings suggest that purely accounting changes can have “real” effects on governmental pension policy.

As of December 2008, state governments had approximately$1.94 trillion set aside in pension funds for their employees. How does the value of these assets compare to the present value of states' pension liabilities? Just as future Social Security and Medicare liabilities do not appear in the headline numbers of the U.S. federal debt, the financial liability from underfunded public pensions does not appear in the headline numbers of state debt. If pensions are underfunded, then the gap between pension assets and liabilities is off-balance-sheet government debt. We show that government accounting standards require states to use procedures that severely understate their liabilities. We then discuss the true economic funding of state public pension plans. Using market-based discount rates that reflect the risk profile of the pension liabilities, we calculate that the present value of the already-promised pension liabilities of the 50 U.S. states amount to $ 5.17 trillion, assuming that states cannot default on pension benefits that workers have already earned. Net of the$1.94 trillion in assets, these pensions are underfunded by $ 3.23 trillion. This “pension debt” dwarfs the states' publicly traded debt of $0.94 trillion. And we show that even before the market collapse of 2008, the system was economically severely underfunded, though public actuarial reports presented the plans' funding status in a more favorable light.

Early retirement appears to have a significant negative impact on the cognitive ability of people in their early 60s that is both quantitatively important and causal. We obtain this finding using cross-nationally comparable survey data from the United States, England, and Europe that allow us to relate cognition and labor force status. We argue that the effect is causal by making use of a substantial body of research showing that variation in pension, tax, and disability policies explain most variation across countries in average retirement rates. (In an informal manner, we are arguing that public policies that affect the age of retirement may be used as instrumental variables to generate cross-country variation in retirement behavior in order to identify the causal effect of retirement on cognition.)

Since increases in public pensions are generally related to prices or wages or combinations of them, the impact of inflation on the real value of benefits can often be neglected, especially in the case of indexation to prices. With high and accelerating/ decelerating inflation like that currently prevailing in Hungary, however, this is not the case. (i) With fast inflation of basic necessities, the proportional indexation of benefits in progress devalues the lowest benefits, which have to pay for above-the-average consumption share of these goods. (ii) Annual lumpy increases of these benefits entail too high an intra-year drop in the real value of benefits. (iii) With accelerating inflation, the declining real value of delayed initial benefits may incentivise immediate retirement. (iv) With unindexed parameter values (like progressivity bending points), the initial benefits structure unintentionally changes.

We examine compensation for endowment Chief Investment Officers (CIOs) overseeing portfolios with significant allocations to alternatives. We find widespread use of bonuses and that large endowments with high alternative allocations hire CIOs with stronger backgrounds, pay them more, and have higher pay-for-performance sensitivity. We find weak evidence of a relationship between compensation and future performance. Our results align with contract theory predictions but differ from empirical findings on pension funds. Endowments pay CIOs more, rely more on bonuses, attract more experienced professionals, and have lower turnover than pensions. This suggests more effective talent management compared to politically influenced public pensions.

All countries in the former transition economies of Central, Eastern, and Southern Europe have undertaken public pension reforms of varying depth and orientation, often with the support of the World Bank. Although the reformed public pension schemes provide broad benefit adequacy, in most cases additional measures are needed to achieve fiscal sustainability in an aging society. 'Adequacy of Retirement Income after Pension Reforms in Central, Eastern, and Southern Europe: Eight Country Studies' assesses the benefit adequacy of the reformed pension systems for eight countries—Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Croatia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, the Slovak Republic, and Slovenia—to identify policy gaps and options. The authors identify the motivations for reform against the backdrop of the trend toward multi-pillar arrangements, document key provisions, and compare them in the context of the World Bank's five-pillar paradigm for pension reform. They then evaluate the sustainability and adequacy of reformed pension systems and provide recommendations to address gaps and take advantage of opportunities for further reforms. The case studies and summary suggest the following broad policy conclusions: • Fiscal sustainability has improved in most study countries, but few are fully prepared for the inevitability of population aging. • The linkage between contributions and benefits has been strengthened, and pension system designs are better suited to market conditions • Levels of income replacement are generally adequate for all but some categories of workers (including those with intermittent formal sector employment or low lifetime wages), and addressing their needs requires initiatives that go beyond pension policy. • Further reforms should focus on extending labor force participation by the elderly to avoid benefit cuts that could undermine adequacy and very high contribution rates that could discourage formal sector employment. • More decisive financial market reforms are needed for funded provisions to deliver on the expectations of participants and keep funded pensions safe. This book will be of interest to policy makers, researchers, and everyone interested in the topic of pensions in the region, and beyond.

This study examines empirically the impact of various characteristics of pension systems, in particular their quality and integrity, on income inequality, utilizing micro-level data from the United States, United Kingdom, Netherlands, Türkiye and Italy. To this end, the income inequality model, which includes public pension (or public/private pension mix), age, education, gender, marital status and employment as independent variables, has been estimated using quantile regression. The results provide a number of valuable information on the impact of the pension system on income inequality: (i) Public pension income significantly reduces overall income inequality across almost all inequality groups in all countries, except for the UK and the Netherlands; (ii) Different types of pension systems vary significantly in their redistributive effects on income; (iii) The empirical results also show that the effect of different pension systems on inequality changes by inequality groups significantly.