Work in progress
1.-Benchmarking Spanish Defined Benefit Pensions Using a Notional Defined Contribution Approach: A Cohort-Based Analysis of Disability and Retirement Pensions
This study benchmarks the actuarial fairness and sustainability of Spain’s defined benefit (DB) public pension system using the principles of Notional Defined Contribution (NDC) systems for the period 2019-2023. Using the Continuous Sample of Working Lives (Muestra Continua de Vidas Laborales, MCVL), a comprehensive administrative micro-dataset containing detailed individual-level information on employment histories, pension entitlements, and demographic characteristics, we estimate the notional capital that individuals would have accumulated under an NDC scheme. We then compare this hypothetical accumulation with the capital cost of actual DB pensions, assessing implicit subsidies or penalties across cohorts, gender, income groups, and employment sectors. In addition to retirement pensions, we explicitly analyze disability contingencies. Our calculations incorporate differentiated mortality profiles that account for the pension amount and contingency type (retirement or disability). Furthermore, we compute the expected Internal Rate of Return (IRR) implicit in the Spanish DB pensions, providing additional insights into the implicit redistributive effects and actuarial fairness within the DB framework.
2.-Divorce insurance: actuarial reality, legal challenges, and fictional imagination (with Juan Bataller-Grau)
Divorce insurance is frequently proposed but rarely implemented, revealing a persistent gap between actuarial feasibility and social acceptance. This paper clarifies the technical, legal, and cultural conditions that shape that gap and asks how fiction influences the debate. Combining a comparative case review of products in Europe and North America with textual analysis of the 2025 South-Korean series The Divorce Insurance, we integrate actuarial modelling, EU insurance law, and media studies.
Results show that divorce meets classical insurability criteria and could be authorised under Solvency II as legal-expenses or nuptiality cover, yet moral-hazard concerns, regulatory ambiguity, and stigma restrict market entry. Fictional representation humanises these barriers: by casting the actuary as protagonist, the series translates abstract risk into relatable dilemmas and exposes cultural taboos around commodifying marital failure.
The study contributes a novel framework for comparing narrative and real-world perspectives on insurance innovation. The findings indicate that divorce-insurance designs are most likely to succeed when actuarial soundness, legal compliance and narrative legitimacy are aligned, and that collaboration among actuaries, regulators and storytellers could help bring socially sensitive insurance products to market.
Recent WP (not yet published)
35.-Vidal-Meliá, C. (2025). Divorce Insurance: A Concept Ahead of Its Time or Doomed to Fail?. Documentos de Trabajo del ICAE, no. 2, 1-46.
Estado: No publicado. Primera ronda
34.-Vidal-Meliá, C., Pérez-Salamero González, J. M., Garvey, A. M., & Castañer, A. (2024). The supplementary table on pensions (Table 29): Actuarial balance sheet update for the Spanish pension system to 2021, wave three. FEDEA, I Jornadas sobre el Sistema Público de Pensiones y Seguridad Social. Estudios sobre la Economía Española, no. 2024-18.
Estado: No publicado. Primera ronda.
33.-Vidal-Meliá, C., Ventura, M., Regúlez Castillo, M., & Pérez-Salamero González, J. M. (2023). Inequalities in the longevity of females and males aged 65+ in Spain, 2008-2021: The role of pension income. Documentos de Trabajo del ICAE, no. 8, 1-40.
Estado: No publicado. Primera ronda.