Having a pension could boost returns on other investments

By Staff | January 14, 2019 | Last updated on January 14, 2019
1 min read

Belonging to an employer-sponsored pension plan helps boost returns on workers’ outside investments, finds new research from Statistics Canada.

Although previous research has examined how membership in a pension can affect how much workers save, StatsCan sought to understand the potential effects on generated returns.

To that end, StatsCan analyzed the relationship between pension coverage and the investment performance in TFSAs for a representative sample of approximately 345,000 Canadian taxpayers between 2009 and 2013. Overall, it finds that pension coverage has a “positive but modest effect” on TFSA performance: belonging to a pension at some point leads to a higher average rate of return of approximately 0.50% to 1.25%.

In terms of explaining the effect, StatsCan points to a couple of possible reasons. One, having a pension may cause workers to start thinking about saving earlier in life; and two, having core retirement savings in a pension may enable workers to invest in riskier assets in their private investments, producing higher returns.

“Taken together, the findings suggest that the gradual decline in [pension] coverage in some industries over the past several decades could have led to a corresponding decline in non-workplace risk-taking or investment performance and, as a result, may have even contributed to the aggregate decline in private saving rates,” StatsCan’s report says. “The results of this study are consistent with the notion that programs aimed at directly improving saving outcomes—for example, by simplifying the process of making complex financial decisions—are desirable.”

Advisor.ca staff

Staff

The staff of Advisor.ca have been covering news for financial advisors since 1998.