Heidi Karjalainen joined the IFS in 2019. She is currently a Senior Research Economist working in the Retirement, Savings, and Ageing sector. Her current work includes research on pensions policy, saving for retirement, and health and cognition among older people. She is also one of the authors of the IFS Pensions Review, a multi-year project on the UK pension system and of the future of financial security in retirement. Before joining the IFS Heidi worked in the private sector in infrastructure financing.
Event
1 November 2021 at 16:00<p>Please see above for details on how to watch this event online.</p>
Why should people save for retirement and why do governments intervene in people's pension saving decisions? How has the UK pension system changed over time? This lecture will discuss key themes around pension saving, specifically discussing the UK policy context.
As part of this year’s Festival of Social Science, IFS delivered a public economic talk on "Why are pensions important?" aimed at A-level and undergraduate students who have an interest in economics or might want to pursue a career in public policy research.
Event
19 October 2021 at 18:00<p>Please see above for details on how to watch this event online.</p>
We are always looking for passionate full-time and part-time research economists, post-doctoral fellows, graduate scholars and summer students. This is a great opportunity to meet us, and ask question about life at IFS and our recruitment process.
In this report, we provide fresh evidence on the nature of paid work at older ages, how employment patterns differ for people in different circumstances and how the situation is changing over time.
Each year early career economists at IFS deliver a day of public economics talks, aimed at A-level and undergraduate students who have an interest in economics or might want to pursue a career in public policy research. As part of this year’s Festival of Social Science, we live streamed a selection of lectures from the series.
In this report, we seek to explain this decline in pension saving amongst the self-employed. We examine the extent to which the decline has been driven by the changing characteristics of the self-employed population. We then explore changing attitudes towards pension saving, and changes in other forms of saving that might represent alternative ways of saving for retirement (and therefore provide an explanation for the patterns in pension saving).
In this chapter we conduct a timely assessment of individuals’ current awareness of their State Pension Age (SPA) and the income they can expect from the state pension, and explore how knowledge of these has changed over the past decade as the state pension system has been reformed.
Older people have been severely affected by the coronavirus pandemic in terms of their health and mortality, but less focus has been given to the financial impact on older adults. Using new data from the COVID-19 questionnaire of the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA), we investigate how adults in their 50s and older have been affected financially by the pandemic.
