Rosaria Simone

Risk and Uncertainty for Flexible Retirement Schemes

Nowadays, we are witnessing a wide and spread need to create flexible retirement schemes for facing global ageing and the prolonging working lives. Many countries have set up Social Security Systems, which link retirement age and/or pension benefits to life expectancy. In this context, we consider an indexing mechanism based on the expected residual life expectancy to adjust the retirement age and keep a constant Expected Pension Period Duration (EPPD). The analysis assesses the impact of different stochastic mortality models on the indexation by forecasting mortality paths based on extrapolative methods. Nevertheless, so far, in recent literature less attention has been given to the uncertainty issue related to model selection, although having appropriate estimates for the risk in mortality projections. With respect to the state of art, our proposal considers model-assembling techniques in order to balance fitting performances and uncertainty related to model selection, as well as uncertainty of parameters estimation.

Flexible Retirement Scheme for the Italian Mortality Experience

Many countries have set up Social Security Systems which link retirement age and/or pension benefits to life expectancy, considering a mechanism for indexing the retirement age and/or pension benefits. The issue is a subject of great interest in recent literature; the debate outlines new directions in pension scheme developments and presents experiences with flexible pension schemes from various countries.

An Inflated Model to Account for Large Heterogeneity in Ordinal Data

In sample surveys where people are asked to express their opinions, a high level of indecision among respondents may generate sub-optimal statistical analyses caused by large heterogeneity in the responses. We discuss a model belonging to the class of generalized cub models that is suitable for this kind of surveys. Then, we examine a real case study where the observed heterogeneity as well as respondents’ indecision can be analyzed within the theoretical framework of the proposed model leading to convincing interpretations. A comparison with current literature and some concluding remarks end the paper.