The Governance of Public Pensions: An Institutional Framework

Abstract

Prior studies of public pensions emphasize the effect of the political economy on the performance of pension systems. We argue that this approach overlooks important institutional features of pension governance and fails to account for endogenous, indirect, and lagged effects. In this article, we describe those limitations and develop an institutional framework to explain the complexity of public pension governance. We identify and discuss critical environmental conditions, formal institutions, and the causal pathways between institutions and pension performance. We also use a case study of the Florida Retirement System to illustrate the explanatory power of the institutional framework.

‘No country for old men’? The multiplier effects of pensions in Portuguese municipalities

“…First, they provide evidence that pensions (or in a more enlarged perspective, transfers) do not have unidirectional effects that converge, according to the claims of Matkin et al . (2016). Second, according to our results, pensions exert a slightly negative direct effect on local purchasing power, the most intriguing finding.…”

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