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Does automatic enrollment into retirement saving increase household debt? We study the randomized roll-out of automatic enrollment pensions to ~160,000 employers in the United Kingdom with 2-29 employees. We find that the additional savings generated through automatic enrollment are partially offset by increases in unsecured debt. Over the first 41 months after enrollment, each additional month increases the average automatically enrolled employee's pension savings by £32-£38, unsecured debt (such as personal loans and bank overdrafts) by £7, the likelihood of having a mortgage by 0.05 percentage points, and mortgage balances by £118. Automatic enrollment causes loan defaults to fall and credit scores to rise modestly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the estimation of long-term yields from UK housing markets. The authors use publicly available data on leasehold extensions to estimate the monthly long-term yield of housing in the UK. Leaseholds are typically extended when the current lease has 60 to 90 years left, and increasing the duration of a leasehold increases its market value. The researchers found that when a leasehold was extended, its price increased by about 10 percent relative to a similar property without an extension. The estimates suggest a decline in long-term housing yields from 5.2 percent in 2003 to 2.8 percent in 2023, which may have been driven by a common factor and the elasticity of housing supply. [Extracted from the article]