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- Sustainable Architecture for Finance in Europe (SAFE) (21) (remove)
In diesem Beitrag wird ein Vorschlag vorgestellt, wie es trotz langfristiger Niedrigzinsen möglich ist, die vor 18 Jahren eingeführte Riester-Rente so umzugestalten, dass alle Beteiligten davon profitieren. Wird die Mindestauszahlung am Ende der Vertragslaufzeit nur für die Eigenbeiträge, nicht aber für die staatlichen Zulagen garantiert, können deutlich höhere Renditen erzielt werden. Unter dem Strich haben dann nicht nur Privatleute mehr Geld aus ihrer Altersvorsorge, sondern der Staat wird mehr Steuern einnehmen und die Anbieter haben mehr Spielraum für bedarfsgerechte Produktgestaltung.
Die „Rente mit 63“ hat wieder einmal den Blick auf den Renteneintritt gerichtet. In der öffentlichen Debatte werden dabei zwei Ereignisse regelmäßig vermischt: das Ende des Arbeitslebens und der Beginn der Rentenzahlung. Dabei müssen beide nicht unmittelbar aufeinander folgen. Unter bestimmten Umständen kann es finanziell attraktiv sein, die staatliche Rente nicht sofort nach dem Ausstieg aus dem Erwerbsleben zu beantragen, sondern die Ausgaben bis zum späteren Rentenbeginn durch den Abbau von Finanzkapital zu finanzieren. Dieser Beitrag gibt einen kurzen Einblick in die neueste Studie von Olivia Mitchell, Andreas Hubener und Raimund Maurer zur Alterssicherung in den USA und stellt auch Berechnungen für Deutschland auf.
Der Koalitionsvertrag 2021 sieht eine generationengerechte Absicherung des Rentenniveaus durch eine teilweise aus Haushaltsmitteln finanzierte Kapitaldeckung vor. Um dieses Ziel zu verwirklichen, wird hier die Einführung einer Generationenrente ab Geburt vorgeschlagen. Dabei wird aus Haushaltsmitteln ein Betrag von € 5.000 für jedes Neugeborene nach Grundsätzen des professionellen Anlagemanagements am globalen Kapitalmarkt angelegt. Konzeptionell soll sich diese Generationenrente am Modell der Basisrente(§10 Abs. 1 Nr. 2 b EStG) orientieren, d.h. die akkumulierten Gelder sind weder beleihbar, vererbbar noch übertragbar und können frühestens ab Alter 63 zugunsten einer lebenslangen Monatsrente verwendet werden. Unsere Berechnungen zeigen, dass durch die hier vorgeschlagene Generationenrente unabhängig vom Verlauf der individuellen Erwerbsbiographie, Altersarmut für die vom demographischen Wandel besonders betroffenen zukünftigen Generationen vermieden wird.
Do required minimum distribution 401(k) rules matter, and for whom? Insights from a lifecylce model
(2021)
Tax-qualified vehicles helped U.S. private-sector workers accumulate $25Tr in retirement assets. An often-overlooked important institutional feature shaping decumulations from these retirement plans is the “Required Minimum Distribution” (RMD) regulation, requiring retirees to withdraw a minimum fraction from their retirement accounts or pay excise taxes on withdrawal shortfalls. Our calibrated lifecycle model measures the impact of RMD rules on financial behavior of heterogeneous households during their worklives and retirement. We show that proposed reforms to delay or eliminate the RMD rules should have little effects on consumption profiles but more impact on withdrawals and tax payments for households with bequest motives.
Dynamics of life course family transitions in Germany: exploring patterns, process and relationships
(2023)
This paper explores dynamics of family life events in Germany using discrete time event history analysis based on SOEP data. We find that higher educational attainment, better income level, and marriage emerge as salient protective factors mitigating the risk of mortality; better education also reduces the likelihood of first marriage whereas, lower educational attainment, protracted period, and presence of children act as protective factors against divorce. Our key finding shows that disparity in mean life expectancies between individuals from low- and high-income brackets is observed to be 9 years among males and 6 years among females, thereby illustrating the mortality inequality attributed to income disparities. Our estimates show that West Germans have low risk of death, less likelihood of first marriage, and they have a high risk of divorce and remarriage compared to East Germans.
Social Security rules that determine retirement, spousal, and survivor benefits, along with benefit adjustments according to the age at which these are claimed, open up a complex set of financial options for household decisions. These rules influence optimal household asset allocation, insurance, and work decisions, subject to life cycle demographic shocks, such as marriage, divorce, and children. Our model-based research generates a wealth profile and a low and stable equity fraction consistent with empirical evidence. We confirm predictions that wives will claim retirement benefits earlier than husbands, while life insurance is mainly purchased by younger men. Our policy simulations imply that eliminating survivor benefits would sharply reduce claiming differences by sex while dramatically increasing men’s life insurance purchases.
US investors hold much less foreign stocks than mean/variance analysis applied to historical data predicts. In this article, we investigate whether this home bias can be explained by Bayesian approaches to international asset allocation. In contrast to mean/variance analysis, Bayesian approaches employ different techniques for obtaining the set of expected returns. They shrink sample means towards a reference point that is inferred from economic theory. We also show that one of the Bayesian approaches leads to the same implications for asset allocation as mean-variance/tracking error criterion. In both cases, the optimal portfolio is a combination the market portfolio and the mean/variance efficient portfolio with the highest Sharpe ratio.
Applying the Bayesian approaches to the subject of international diversification, we find that substantial home bias can be explained when a US investor has a strong belief in the global mean/variance efficiency of the US market portfolio and when he has a high regret aversion falling behind the US market portfolio. We also find that the current level of home bias can justified whenever regret aversion is significantly higher than risk aversion.
Finally, we compare the Bayesian approaches to mean/variance analysis in an empirical out-ofsample study. The Bayesian approaches prove to be superior to mean/variance optimized portfolios in terms of higher risk-adjusted performance and lower turnover. However, they not systematically outperform the US market portfolio or the minimum-variance portfolio.
This Chapter explores how an environment of persistent low returns influences saving, investing, and retirement behaviors, as compared to what in the past had been thought of as more “normal” financial conditions. Our calibrated lifecycle dynamic model with realistic tax, minimum distribution, and Social Security benefit rules produces results that agree with observed saving, work, and claiming age behavior of U.S. households. In particular, our model generates a large peak at the earliest claiming age at 62, as in the data. Also in line with the evidence, our baseline results show a smaller second peak at the (system-defined) Full Retirement Age of 66. In the context of a zero-return environment, we show that workers will optimally devote more of their savings to non-retirement accounts and less to 401(k) accounts, since the relative appeal of investing in taxable versus tax-qualified retirement accounts is lower in a low return setting. Finally, we show that people claim Social Security benefits later in a low interest rate environment.
Many nations incentivize retirement saving by letting workers defer taxes on pension contributions, imposing them when retirees withdraw their funds. Using a dynamic life cycle model, we show how ‘Rothification’ – that is, taxing 401(k) contributions rather than payouts – alters saving, investment, consumption, and Social Security claiming patterns. We find that taxing pension contributions instead of withdrawals leads to delayed retirement, somewhat lower lifetime tax payments, and relatively small reductions in consumption. Indeed, the two tax regimes generate quite similar relative inequality metrics: the relative consumption inequality ratio under TEE is only four percent higher than in the EET case. Moreover, results indicate that the Gini measures are also strikingly similar under the EET and the TEE regimes for lifetime consumption, cash on hand, and 401(k) assets, differing by only 1-4 percent. While tax payments are higher early in life under the TEE regime, they are slightly lower in the long run. Moreover, higher EET tax payments are also accompanied by higher volatility. We therefore find few reasons for policymakers to favor either tax approach on egalitarian or revenue-enhancing grounds.