Designing Resilient Pension Schemes

Dear Colleagues,

The ability to identify, measure, forecast, and manage the economic, demographic, social, financial, and political risks that challenge the long-term objectives of public and private retirement income schemes is of paramount importance for creating and managing financially sustainable, resilient, adequate, and intra- and intergenerationally fair public and private pension schemes. This Special Issue of Risks is devoted to high-quality papers that move the state-of-the-art forward with innovative theoretical, practical, and policy-oriented developments in building pension schemes that are resilient to shocks, which can handle the long-term trends in population and financial markets, and which provide novel solutions for the largely unaddressed payout phase of pensions. We welcome papers related, but not limited to, the following topical issues:

1. The resilience of pension schemes to shocks (COVID-19, labor market, climate change, inflation)

• Automatic adjustment mechanisms in pension systems;
• The impact of the health and climate crisis on pensions;
• Non-standard forms of employment and pension redesign;
• The design of financial and non-financial DB and DC retirement schemes;
• The role of public pension reserve funds: investment policy, governance;
• Pension funds and financial repression;
• Reform retrenchments and the political economy of pension reforms.

2. Population ageing and financial market issues

• The implications of financial market structures for individual saving for retirement;
• The interaction of ageing populations and financial market composition;
• Policies and models for dealing with socio-economic differences in longevity and lifespan inequality in the three stages of pensions: accumulation, annuitization, decumulation;
• The implications of the global ageing of populations for the development of the financial rate of return;
• The role of financial literacy in saving for retirement;
• Effects of financial inclusion on the distribution of lifetime income.

3. The interest rate environment and the future of pensions

• Challenges in meeting existing obligations: the search for yield and financial stability, alternative asset classes, increasing contributions, and alternative funding sources;
• Behavioral responses to low interest rates: work, retirement, saving, and investing conduct;
• Developing risk-sharing retirement income schemes;
• Asset-liability management in pension funds and life insurance.

4. Novel solutions for the payout phase of pensions

• Insurance and non-insurance (closed or open) participating longevity-linked life annuities and other risk-sharing pooling arrangements (e.g., modern Tontines);
• Income drawdown options for DC pension schemes;
• Integrating the accumulation and decumulation phases of pensions: housing wealth, equity release schemes and the financing of retirement income and long-term care;
• The taxation of pensions.

Prof. Dr. Jorge Miguel Bravo
Prof. Dr. Mercedes Ayuso
Prof. Dr. Edward Palmer
Prof. Dr. Robert Holzmann
Guest Editors

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