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

Manuscript Submission Information

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Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Risks is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1800 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• pension design, modelling and reform
• automatic adjustment mechanisms in pensions
• population ageing
• public pension reserve funds
• socio-economic differences in longevity and lifespan inequality
• the resilience of pension schemes to shocks (e.g., COVID 19, labour market)
• insurance and non-insurance retirement income schemes
• financial market stability
• financial repression and reform retrenchments
• linking pensions to life expectancy
• financial literacy and saving for retirement
• behavioral economics and finance
• risk-sharing retirement income arrangements
• equity release schemes
• risk-management
• asset-liability management
• income drawdown options and welfare analysis
• the taxation of pensions
• financial inclusion