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Household Saving Rates and the Design of Public Pension Programmes: Cross–Country Evidence

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 March 2020

Richard Disney
Richard Disney*
Affiliation:
University of Nottingham and Institute for Fiscal Studies, London. Tel: +44 1159 515619
*
e-mail: richard.disney@nottingham.ac.uk
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Abstract

I argue that the offsetting effect of public pension contributions on household retirement saving depends on how closely the public pension programme imitates a private retirement saving plan (i.e. the ‘actuarial’ content of the public pension programme) — the closer the design of the programme to a private retirement saving plan, the higher the offset. I estimate the determinants of household saving rates in a cross-country panel, augmenting standard measures of public pension programme generosity and cost by indicators that proxy the actuarial component of the programme. These indicators affect saving rates as predicted.

Keywords

Pension reformHousehold savingE21G23H24
Type
Articles
Information
National Institute Economic Review , Volume 198 , October 2006 , pp. 61 - 74
Copyright
Copyright © 2006 National Institute of Economic and Social Research

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Footnotes

My thanks to participants in an IZA Conference in Lisbon and the CESifo/CEBR conference in Copenhagen, and to Tullio Jappelli and Gulglielmo Weber for useful comments at various stages in this paper's preparation.

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