International Pension Workshop 2026: a melting pot of disciplines
The International Pension Workshop has come to a close. Over the past few days, it served as a gathering of researchers from a wide variety of disciplines. This melting pot ensures that multiple perspectives are represented, which not only leads to valuable discussions but also to richer and better-substantiated insights.
“Who here is a researcher in finance? Who is from macro- or microeconomics? Psychology? Communication? Law?” During the plenary opening session, Scientific Director Mathijs van Dijk of Netspar asked the participants in the room to raise their hands. The result showed that researchers from a wide variety of disciplines were represented at this year’s event.
Stefan Zeisberger, chair of the program committee for the International Pension Workshop 2026, then takes the floor. He provides further details about the program, which spans three days and includes a total of 27 sessions, 54 papers and two keynote speeches. Opportunities to meet informally during a social event in the host city of Leiden round out the program.
Do auto-enrolment and auto-escalation encourage pension savings?
The first keynote speaker is David Laibson, Robert I. Goldman Professor of Economics at Harvard University and Faculty Dean of Lowell House. He discusses the effect of various interventions designed to encourage people to save for retirement. In the United States, employees save for retirement through the well-known 401(k) plan. “This is a tax-advantaged voluntary retirement savings account for American employees that is funded through payroll deductions,” Laibson explains. “The employee determines the contribution rate and the asset allocation. The employer matches this up to a certain limit.”
Together with researchers from the field, Laibson explored ways to encourage Americans to save more for retirement. The first is auto-enrolment, whereby you are automatically enrolled in a retirement savings account when you join a company. The second is auto-escalation, whereby your retirement savings contribution rate increases by one percentage point each year. Expectations are high for both of these interventions, especially auto-escalation. Laibson: “We’ve always thought auto-escalation would be the real sledgehammer behind a rapid increase in U.S. retirement savings. Moreover, many other countries have at least implemented auto-enrolment, and auto-escalation is also gaining popularity worldwide.”
According to the Harvard professor, however, the effects of auto-enrolment and auto-escalation in the American context are smaller than expected, a finding that is documented with existing data. Laibson: “Over the entire lifetime of retirement savings, the median defined-contribution balance of a U.S. household in their 60’s is $20,000. Below the median, this balance quickly drops to zero, meaning that half the population effectively has no money set aside in Defined Contribution accounts.” Laibson notes that the effects of the nudges “fade away.” For example, there is a “leakage” of the effects because employees withdraw Defined Contribution balances when changing jobs, which is possible by paying at most a 10% penalty. There are also many people who join a company and opt out of auto-escalation or leave too soon to take full advantage of auto-escalation.
Laibson notes that the policy implications primarily concern the United States. “The idea that you can withdraw retirement funds at any time during your working life is something that’s fairly unique to the United States and Canada. I think present bias brings all these facts together. It explains why people adopt a partly passive attitude and delay changing the default setting that has been set for them. It also explains why households ultimately decide to withdraw the money anyway, because they are under significant financial pressure because present bias leads them to accumulate credit card debt.” He sees potential solutions in making Defined Contribution balances transferable between jobs and in making some retirement savings less liquid until retirement. He is also considering the creation of two automatic savings accounts through one’s employer: one for an emergency fund that is highly liquid during one’s working life, and one for retirement that is highly illiquid during one’s working life.
Four types of policy instruments to encourage voluntary retirement savings
The second keynote speaker is Marie Brière. She is Head of Investor Intelligence and Academic Partnerships at the Amundi Institute, a European asset manager, and Managing Director of Institut Louis Bachelier, a research organization based in Paris. In her keynote address, she describes her research into policy instruments designed to encourage voluntary retirement savings in Europe, and specifically in France. She notes that this is necessary due, among other things, to longer life expectancy and a declining ratio of workers to retirees. Brière identifies four types of policy instruments that have been developed over time in response to these trends: tax incentives, pension contribution matching (i.e., additional contributions from governments or employers) and auto-enrolment, product design, and digitization.
Tax incentives were part of the first wave of policy innovations. Brière examines this in detail based on one of her studies on the tax treatment of personal retirement accounts. Brière: “France introduced pre-tax pension contributions in 2019. This was a new development, as French savers had previously been able to save only on an after-tax basis.” This reform, the Loi Pacte, appears to have had a “modest but significant impact” on the number of people saving in the pension savings plan. However, the impact is unevenly distributed, according to the researcher. “The effects are particularly noticeable among higher-income workers, older workers and ‘active’ savers.”
Brière then discusses two other methods introduced in France to encourage retirement savings: matching and auto-enrolment. “Can French retirement savers be nudged?” is the question she poses in this context. Liquidity appears to be crucial in long-term retirement savings, especially for younger people. Brière: “With liquid savings, there is a risk that people will not save enough for retirement. But if savers have precautionary liquidity motives, this can actually serve as an incentive to save.” There are also instances of exceptional withdrawals from long-term retirement savings plans that are partially offsetting the retirement saving nudges.
When it comes to product design, Brière describes two extremes: “On the one hand, there are annuities that offer guaranteed income protection against longevity risk, but also provide a payout that is irreversible. On the other hand, it is possible to gradually withdraw capital during retirement, but this carries the risk that the capital will be exhausted before death.” She therefore advocates for hybrid solutions with risk-sharing, which offer both flexibility and protection against idiosyncratic longevity risk and better align with the diverse preferences of retirement plan participants.
Finally, Brière discusses digitalization and the role of robo-advisors. These digital tools can support investment decisions by automatically constructing and adjusting portfolios. Her research shows that robo-advisors “are associated with a higher level of attention and trading activity” and that this leads to greater exposure to riskier investments and higher returns. At the same time, it appears that trust in and use of these tools remain limited, and that younger, male and less affluent groups in particular are utilizing this technology. Digitalization can thus contribute to better investment decisions, but it does not fully resolve behavioral issues.
Interviews with participants
How do participants experience the International Pension Workshop? We’ve asked three participants to share their views; they all contributed to the International Pension Workshop in different roles:
Elena Stancanelli
Elena Stancanelli is a professor of economics at the Paris School of Economics and a member of the Scientific Council of Netspar, where she evaluates research proposals for Theme Grants. She has participated in Netspar conferences since the very beginning and emphasizes their added value: “The great thing about presenting your research at Netspar is the valuable feedback, increased visibility and impact. For example, after presentations, you may see that fellow researchers start working on similar topics. Or they’re already working on them and then they exchange ideas. The discussions and feedback are really excellent. This ultimately increases the chances of publication.
Where does Stancanelli see further opportunities for research in the field of pensions and aging? “Of course, a great deal of research has already been conducted in the past on many different aspects”, says the professor. “But I think there may still be plenty of room for new research from a data perspective, linking survey data, administrative data and behavioral experiments. For example, both keynotes [Marie Brière and David Laibson, ed.] presented evidence from a variety of new data sources, including also private insurance companies.
Stancanelli gives an example of the use of different registers linked together from administrative data to identify people’s preferences for joint retirement. This is a Norwegian study that Stancanelli worked on. “In this study, we had insight into the exact timing of a person’s retirement, their work history and their income. There were also changes to the pension system, which allowed us to determine who was affected by the changes and who was not, among dual-earner couples. And we matched partners to the work history of their mothers, to track how traditional gender norms, associated with a stay-home mom, affected partners’ joint retirement strategies. For me, the most important innovation is that we have more data sources with which to test hypotheses. This also allows us to examine the same question from different angles.”
Marlene Koch
Marlene Koch is an assistant professor of Finance at Maastricht University. She has a background in actuarial mathematics, but during her doctoral research she began to focus increasingly on financial economics. Koch: “I focus on theoretical household finance. Specifically, this involves making optimal choices regarding consumption, saving and housing with a long-term investment perspective.” She first heard about Netspar during her doctoral research in Germany. “Now that I live here in the Netherlands, I’m also a junior fellow and even more involved in the knowledge network.”
Koch is participating in the International Pension Workshop because the program aligns very closely with her research interests. She also really appreciates the connection to real-world practice. It allows her to see how discussions can have an immediate impact. Koch: “One of my co-authors presented a paper of their own today that I’m not personally involved in. During the discussion, the discussant raised some very valuable points that might also be useful for our joint paper, even though it wasn’t presented here.”
The open atmosphere is also highly appreciated by Koch. “When I first came to the International Pension Workshop, I noticed how everyone here is very open and friendly and reaches out to you proactively. It also always feels a bit like a reunion: you know you’ll see the same people again and you stay up to date on what’s going on. That makes for smooth collaboration.” She also sees it as a positive thing that Netspar also helps junior researchers attend the workshop: “That way, it’s really the quality of your research that determines whether you can attend. That makes it truly inclusive.”
Zitong Ding
Zitong Ding is a Ph.D. candidate at Radboud University. She has a background in law and finance and her Ph.D. research focuses on sustainable finance. She discovered Netspar through her supervisors. “After graduating, I was fortunate to join my current Ph.D. position, which was made possible through a Netspar Theme Grant awarded to my supervisors.” says Ding, “Since then, I’ve been very much involved in the activities of Netspar, including the International Pension Workshop.”
Ding is contributing as a discussant this year. She is doing so during a presentation on financial literacy and technology as they relate to robo-advisors. “I wanted to encourage not only the author but also the audience to think about how we can further apply the article’s findings in pension practice.” In line with this experience, Ding sees how science and practice reinforce each other at Netspar. “What I really appreciate is that you can tell Netspar truly values the power of knowledge and ensures that knowledge is actually put into practice.”
She is particularly drawn to the international nature of this gathering today and the networking opportunities it offers. “As an academic, the nature of your work requires you to be mobile due to limited positions in the academic world. So it’s becoming increasingly important to build your network, not just within your own university or your own country, but worldwide.”