Household saving rates and the design of public pension programmes: cross-country evidence

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.pension reform, household saving.

Ageing and saving

The issue of ageing and saving has two distinct facets. On the one hand, there is the individual issue. Each of us is getting older and wants to make sure that our savings plans are appropriate. I term this the ‘microeconomic’ aspect of saving and ageing. At the same time, OECD economies are themselves ageing: people are living longer, the baby-boom generation, born after 1945, is passing through to middle age and, in some countries, fertility rates are below replacement levels. I term this the ‘macroeconomic’ aspect of ageing, and it will affect these economies in almost all dimensions: in savings and investment rates, in the growth rates of productivity, output and public spending, in wage structure, educational attainment and labour supply (Disney, 1996). And, of course, there are links between the microeconomic and macroeconomic facets of ageing: for example, as a country ages, with more elderly dependants relative to workers, it becomes harder to sustain the social security pension without higher taxes. In turn, a prospective decline in the social security pension may cause people to revise their individual or household saving and retirement strategies.

Occupational pension schemes: prospects and reforms in the UK

Private pensions seem likely to provide the dominant source of income for the majority of retired workers in the future. New private pension instruments developed since 1986, notably personal pensions, have proved popular, but concern as to ‘overselling’ of personal pensions and as to the risks associated with the ‘money purchase’ form of pension provision is frequently voiced by commentators. For many people, rightly or wrongly, the ‘traditional’ finalsalary- based occupational pension remains the bench-mark for private pension provision in the UK. Nevertheless, recent trends, most notably the growth of alternatives to final- salary-based arrangements and a shift in attitudes towards pension provision among employers, suggest that the occupational pension sector will undergo significant changes in the future.

House Price Volatility and Household Indebtedness in the United States and the United Kingdom

Recent household financial models predict that collateral-constrained households are more likely to increase debt-financed spending in response to rising house values. We augment this model to consider the use of unsecured debt such as credit cards. Using household panel data, we consider microeconomic evidence on the behaviour of households in the United States and the United Kingdom in response to rising house prices. The evidence confirms that previously collateral-constrained households in both countries increase their indebtedness more than unconstrained households as house prices rose. But whereas United Kingdom households used house price gains primarily to refinance existing unsecured debt, United States households were more likely to increase their total indebtedness. Our results imply that on average households in the United States extract as much as 10% of their housing equity gains to fund consumption spending, and suggest that housing wealth effects predominantly arise through unbinding liquidity constraints.Housing wealth; collateral; unsecured debt; consumer spending.

What can we learn from retirement expectations data?

This paper analyses retirement expectations and outcomes using the two waves of the UK Retirement Survey, undertaken in 1988-89 and 1994. We argue that responses to questions on expectations are not straightforward to interpret where individuals are asked to report point expectations. As in the studies for the US by Bernheim, the evidence here suggests that individuals tend to report their most likely retirement date. About half of the sample retired when they expected. Men tend to retire earlier than expected on average, but with only two waves of data we cannot reject that this is caused by a common shock over the period. Changes in health and marital status are linked to divergences between expectations and realisations. We extend the analysis to consider ѤonҴ know' responses, which we argue may be a rational response when individuals face greater uncertainty over their future retirement date. We provide evidence to support this hypothesis. Finally, we show that information on expectations can improve the accuracy of models of actual retirement behaviour, most likely because they provide a suitable proxy for unobserved tastes for income and leisure.Retirement behaviour, expectations

MONOPSONY WITH HETEROGENEOUS LABOUR: EVIDENCE FROM ECONOMIC TRANSITION

Recent years have seen revived interest in the role of monopsony power in wage-setting in the public sector. Most evidence focuses on individual occupations rather than considering the implications for wage and employment structure where the state has differential monopsony power across different types of workers. A model of monopsony with heterogeneous workers is constructed here. A large scale 'natural experiment' of the consequences of declining monopsony power is the process of economic transition from communist regimes to market-based economies. The paper shows that many salient features of economic transition, such as increasing wage inequality, rising returns to education, rising public sector pay 'markups' and changing employment composition, are compatible with this 'story'.Monopsony Economic transition Wage structure

Changing public sector wage differentials in the UK

The paper estimates public sector wage differentials and their changes over time for men and women in the United Kingdom using panel data from the New Earnings Survey/Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings for the period 1975 to 2006. It presents estimates that are robust to unobserved workforce characteristics and that also show the impact of policy changes and cyclical factors, by allowing the average measured public sector 'premium' or 'penalty' to be time-varying. The methodology also allows us to examine the extent to which discrepancies in public and private sector pay induce changing relative qualities of the sectoral workforces. Results are given for men and women comparing mean wages in the public and private sectors as a whole. There is, on average, a very small positive premium over the whole period for public sector women and a very small penalty for men; however the variability of the differential is much more striking than the average difference. The method can also be applied to sub-groups in the labour market, and we illustrate the case of female public sector nurses and midwives, where the comparison group are private sector workers who have ever been, or will be, public sector nurses or midwives. Measured variations in this nurses' differential reflects the various changes in pay structure and government pay policies over the period; it is striking however that in the last decade, the 'raw' differential accruing to public sector nurses and midwives has declined almost continuously, whereas the composition and quality-adjusted differential shows no overall trend.

The economic well-being of older people in international perspective: a critical review

This paper surveys a dozen international comparative studies of poverty, income distribution and older people in industrialized countries using data up to the mid-1990s. It addresses a series of questions. At what level are the incomes of the elderly relative to the population as a whole? How has this changed over the past two decades? How many of the old are poor? How many of the poor are old? Are the oldest of the old poorer than younger pensioners are? The results show that the incomes of older people are typically around 80 per cent of incomes of the whole population. This ratio has been increasing over the past two decades in most countries. Although there remain pockets of poverty among the elderly, the old are generally represented proportionally or under-represented among the poor.pension; income distribution

The abolition of the earnings rule for UK pensioners

The US has legislated to abolish its social security earnings test. A priori it is not possible to predict the effect this will have on work incentives. Using data from the Family Expenditure Survey we show that the abolition of the earnings rule in the UK increased the number of hours worked by men. The lack of any evidence of a reduction in hours may be a consequence of those who previously earned more than the earnings threshold deferring pension receipt at an actuarially favourable rate. This is consistent with there being little evidence of a significant change in the number of deferrals after the earnings rule was abolished.

Debt and depression

The paper examines the effect of household financial indebtedness on the psychological well-being of mothers, using a large household survey of families with children for Britain. Although some existing studies find a link between debt and depression, they tend to utilise small and often highly selective samples of people and only self-reported measures of financial stress, responses to which are likely to correlate with other subjective measures of health. Our study constructs a variety of quantitative measures of financial stress and debt difficulties in order to validate selfreported measures. It examines the potential simultaneity of financial and psychological health by appropriate statistical techniques. The results confirm both a direct link between indebtedness and psychological stress and an indirect link through the impact of poor health on economic status.Financial indebtedness, psychological well-being, self-reported measures.