Join us in our upcoming webinar on: 

Behavioural explanations and solutions to the reluctance of retirees to drawdown wealth.

20 September, 2023 / 8:00 AM (EST)

The life-cycle model predicts that people accumulate wealth during their productive careers and draw down their assets after retirement. Yet recent empirical studies for different countries show that many retirees hold on to their assets or even keep on saving well into old age. This presentation will draw upon recently published papers and work-in-progress to investigate this phenomenon. The focus will be the identification of behavioural explanations for the reluctance to drawdown wealth accumulated during working years and the role of behavioural interventions to encourage people to decumulate their wealth in retirement.

Hazel Bateman is a Professor in the School of Risk & Actuarial Studies, UNSW Sydney, and Deputy Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence in Population Ageing Research (CEPAR). Hazel's research focusses on consumer financial decision making especially as it relates to retirement accumulation and decumulation with an emphasis on interventions to facilitate better financial decisions. She also works on design of and demand for retirement products including annuities, long-term care insurance and home equity release products. Hazel has consulted on retirement income issues to international organisations including the OECD, the World Bank, the Social Insurance Administration (China) and the Korean Institute of Health and Social Affairs. She is the Chair of Netspar's Scientific Council and President of the International Pension Research Association (IPRA) and serves on the UniSuper Consultative Committee and the Advisory Boards of the Mercer CFA Institute Global Pension Index, the Conexus Institute and MyHomeStream.

Jennifer Alonso García joined the Department of Mathematics as a (tenured) Professor of Actuarial Science in October 2019. Besides, she is an Associate Investigator at CEPAR, and Netspar Fellow. Her research combines the areas of actuarial science, household, pension and quantitative finance to study the design, risk-sharing and financing of funded and pay-as-you-go retirement income schemes. Jennifer is currently involved in research projects on the financial decision making of households during retirement, life expectancy inequality and design and risk management of equity-linked retirement income products.