IER would like to welcome Dr Mary McMahon, from The University of Queensland, who has arrived this week to start her 4 week IAS Fellowship. Mary will be presenting at various events over the next few weeks, so keep an eye on our news for more information. Professor Mark Watson, Distinguished Professor from Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University in South Africa, will also be visiting IER at the end of June. Together Mary, Mark and Jenny will be pursuing their international research collaboration on older women.

As part of an IER research partnership, Dr Yuxin Li will visiting Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, China for the next two weeks. She will be working on the “Ageing and Elderly Care” research network that has been set up. During her stay at Sun Yat-sen University, Yuxin will also visit two universities in Guangzhou – South China Normal University and Jinan University – with the aim of extending the network. Yuxin will also be attending the International conference on Social Policy and Governance Innovation to be held at South China University of Technology in Guangzhou.

The first round of auto-enrolment into a workplace pension starts today. First proposed by the 2005 Turner Commission report, auto enrolment is intended to help the half of employees who have no supplementary pension to save more for retirement. The rollout has attracted considerable media attention, much of it concentrating upon whether small savers will really benefit and how far the government is prepared to go with its proposal to develop a basic pension that is sufficiently high that such small savings are not means-tested away. IER’s Bernard Casey has recently published a paper on this subject - Voluntary Pension Saving for Old Age: Are the Objectives of Self-responsibility and Security Compatible?. The paper drew comparisons with Germany where policymakers are facing similar challenges (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9515.2012.00853.x/abstract - full content only available to subscribers).

In the next podcast about our work at the Institute for Employment Research, Bernard Casey talks about his research on older workers and the effects of working longer on health and well-being. Bernard also considers how employment, pensions and social cares systems interrelate, together with the effect of working longer on people’s physical and mental health.

Bernard Casey made presentations at two recent events on issues relating to the employment of older people.

The first, entitled “The Employment of Older People in a Period of Stagnation and Deregulation” was prepared together with Atsuhiro Yamada from the Department of Economics at Keio University, and delivered at the latest ESRC Rethinking Retirement Seminar Series (University of Kent, 4 May). The presentation focused on older people’s employment in Japan over the past twenty years, looking at changing economic circumstances since the end of the bubble economy and the coming to retirement age of the post war baby-boomers. A copy of the presentation can be downloaded from here.

The second was a presentation on “Working Beyond Retirement: explaining a UK phenomenon” at the 7^th European Conference of the European Social Insurance Platform (Brussels, 23 May). Under the title "Active and Healthy Ageing and Solidarity between Generations - the role of social insurances", the event aimed to clarify the role of the social insurance in addressing the challenges and opportunities of societal ageing. Copies of the slides can be downloaded from here.