IESE and Cobas AM launch new chair to research pensions

IESE and Cobas Asset Management (A.M.) have announced the launch of the Cobas A.M. Chair for Savings and Pensions, headed by IESE Economics Professor Javier Díaz-Giménez. The chair, which will promote knowledge exchange  between companies, governments and academics, will study the pension system in Spain and how it compares with other existing systems, the tax reforms required for the long-term sustainability of the system, the corporate responsibility of entities necessary to promote beneficial change, and individual social security tools pertaining to retirement.

The new chair is headed by IESE Professor Javier Díaz-Giménez, an economist specializing in macroeconomics, who has spent the past several years studying the macroeconomic consequences of reforms in fiscal policy and the pension system. The results of his research have been published in top academic journals such as the Journal of Political Economy and the Journal of Monetary Economics. He is also the author of the university textbook “Macroeconomics: First Concepts.” Díaz-Giménez has been an advisor to the Spanish Ministry of Industry and more recently began serving as an advisor to the Economic Office of the President.

The new chair was conceived with the following objectives:

• Disseminate complementary social security, trying to promote a mixed capitalization and pay-as-you-go model.
• Build knowledge about the limitations of the public pension system and the risks it poses to new generations of retirees that join the system.
• Delve into the analysis of historical data through big data that gives visibility to proposed theoretical approaches.
• Develop calculation tools that enable estimating the necessary savings based on particular needs at the time of retirement.

In the words of Francisco García Paramés, the president and CEO of Cobas Asset Management: “At Cobas Asset Management SGIIC and Cobas Pensiones SGPP we want to collaborate and promote necessary changes so that the pension system evolves towards a mixed model that allows complementary individual savings that strengthen and guarantee the viability of the public pension system.”

Javier Díaz-Giménez, professor of economics and Cobas A.M. Chair for Savings and Pensions at IESE, comments: “The chair will contribute to research into pension systems and retirement savings in an environment of demographic change and will place special emphasis on the Spanish system.”