What governs labour force participation in later life and why is it so different across countries? Health and labour force participation in older ages are not strongly linked, but we observe a large variation across countries in old-age labour force participation. This points to the important role of country-specific regulations governing pension receipt and old-age labour force participation. In addition to the statutory eligibility age for a pension, such country-specific regulations include: earnings tests that limit the amount of earnings when pension benefits are received; the amount of benefit deductions for early retirement; the availability of part-time pensions before normal retirement; special regulations that permit early retirement for certain population groups; and either subsidies or extra costs for employers if they keep older employees in their labour force. This paper asks two questions: Can we link a relatively low labour force participation at ages 60–64 to country-specific regulations that make early retirement attractive? and Can we link a relatively high labour force participation at ages 65–74 to country-specific regulations that make late retirement attractive? To answer these questions, we compared the experiences in a set of developed countries around the world in order to understand better the impact of country-specific rules and laws on work and retirement behaviour at older ages and, by consequence, on the financial sustainability of pension systems.

This study documents that the electoral cost of major pension reforms is lower in countries where the level of financial literacy is higher. The evidence from data on legislative elections held between 1990 and 2010 in 21 advanced countries is robust when we control for macroeconomic, demographic, and political conditions. Interestingly, these findings are not robust when we use less specific indicators of human capital as general schooling, supporting the view that knowledge of basic economic and financial concepts has distinctive features that may help reduce the electoral cost of reforms having a relevant impact on the life cycle of individuals.

In a general equilibrium framework, this paper studies the properties, in terms of labour market distortions and capital accumulation, of three social security systems: a pay-as-you-go notional defined contribution (PAYG NDC), a fully funded (FF), and a novel modified FF (MFF) system, which includes an intragenerational redistributive component to guarantee minimum living standards to future low-income retirees. We show that while PAYG NDC depresses labour supply and physical capital accumulation, FF is neutral on both dimensions. Conversely, MFF slightly increases physical capital accumulation, without significantly reducing labour supply incentives. Moreover, it reduces the burden of future intergenerational redistribution, and increases social welfare.

This study examines the retirement income of women in Europe, focusing on the effect of motherhood. Due to their more interrupted working careers compared to non-mothers and fathers, mothers are likely to accumulate fewer pension entitlements, and consequently, to receive lower incomes in later life. However, pension systems in Europe vary widely in the degree to which they compensate for care-related career interruptions by means of redistributive elements or pension care entitlements. Therefore, care interruptions may matter for the retirement income of women in some countries, but may be rather irrelevant in others. On the basis of life history data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARELIFE) for women aged between 60 and 75 years in 13 European countries, the interplay of individual lifecourse characteristics with institutional and structural factors is examined. The results show that the lower retirement income of mothers is mainly a result of fewer years in employment and lower-status jobs throughout the lifecourse. The analysis of institutional factors reveals that pension care entitlements are not able to provide a compensation for care-related cutbacks in working life. A generally redistributive design of the pension system including basic or targeted pension schemes, in contrast, appears as an effective measure to balance differences in employment participation over the lifecourse.

Previous research unequivocally shows that immigrants are less successful in the labour market than the native-born population. However, little is known about whether ethnic inequality persists after retirement. We use data on 16 Western European countries from the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC, 2004–2013) to provide the first comparative study of ethnic inequalities among the population aged 65 and older. We focus on the retirement income gap (RIG) between immigrants from non-European Union countries and relate its magnitude to country differences in welfare state arrangements. Ethnic inequality after retirement is substantial: after adjusting for key characteristics including age, education and occupational status, the average immigrant penalty across the 16 countries is 28 per cent for men and 29 per cent for women. Country-level regressions show that income gaps are smaller in countries where the pension system is more redistributive. We also find that easy access to long-term residence is associated with larger RIGs, at least for men. There is no clear evidence that immigrants’ access to social security programmes, welfare state transfers to working-age households or the strictness of employment protection legislation affect the size of the RIG.

The paper shows the impact of changes in multi-pillar pension systems in six Central and Eastern European countries for individual pension wealth. It demonstrates that the post-crisis changes in pension system reduced pension wealth of workers in Poland and increased in Lithuania and Slovakia. The change did not have significant impact on pension wealth in Estonia and Romania. The magnitude of this effect is highest in those countries where the reduction of the fully-funded pension contribution was permanent. Loss or gain in pension wealth varies with age of participants – it is higher for younger people, who will accumulate their pension wealth to a larger extent after the change. The level of the change in pension wealth depends also on the wage level – higher earners lose more relative to the average wage level. The difference in pension wealth depends also on the difference between rates of return in fully funded and pay-as-you-go (PAYG) components of the pension system. The net outcome of post-crisis pension system modifications depends both on the magnitude of fully-funded contribution reduction, but also on the design of PAYG component and the way individual pension rights are accrued. These results indicate the rise in implicit liability of pension system in Slovakia to be higher than the reduction of the explicit liability caused by the pension system change and the lower rise of implicit liability in Poland and Latvia.

In this paper, I show that traditional earnings related pay-as-you-go pension systems as we see them in many OECD countries subsidize human capital formation. The reason is that these systems come along with an implicit tax structure that features high tax rates at the beginning of working life and low tax rates toward the end. When the costs of human capital investment are mainly time costs, such an implicit tax structure lowers the costs of human capital investments and simultaneously increases the payoff. The fact that higher skilled workers tend to have steeper wage profiles over the working phase than the unskilled enforces this mechanism. I first show this result in a simple analytical model and then quantify the macroeconomic and welfare effects of making the implicit tax structure age independent in a large-scale overlapping generation model, in which households can invest in human capital both by going to college and through on-the-job training. In terms of welfare, such a reform comes along with a lot of intergenerational redistribution. Although the welfare of current retirees may increase by about 4.5% of their remaining life-time resources, current older workers will lose due to an increase in their implicit tax rates. The welfare of future generations slightly declines by 0.1%.

Redistribution is an inevitable feature of collective pension schemes and economic experiments have revealed that most people have a preference for redistribution that is not merely inspired by self-interest. However, little is known on how these preferences interact with preferences for different pension schemes. In this paper, we review the experimental evidence on preferences for redistribution and suggest some links to redistribution through pensions. For that purpose we distinguish between three types of situations. The first deals with distributional preferences behind a veil of ignorance. In the second type of situation, individuals make choices in front of the veil of ignorance and know their position. Finally, we discuss situations in which income is determined by interdependent rather than individual choices. In the closing sections of the paper, we discuss whether and how these experimental results speak to the redistribution issues of pensions. For example, do they argue for or against mandatory participation? Should we have less redistribution and more actuarial fairness? How does this depend on the type of redistribution involved?

During the post-war years many European countries have implemented far-reaching but diverse pension systems with the objective of providing those in retirement with adequate incomes. In this study, we explore the link between pension systems and the adequacy of retirement income. We analyse the mix of public and private pensions and consider the impact of different policies on poverty rates amongst pensioners. We suggest that only a few European countries have been successful in providing combinations of private and public pensions that improve the adequacy of retirement income.