Endogenous retirement and public pension system reform in Spain

All around the world , developed countries have resorted to parametric reforms of their Social Security systems, in an attempt to lessen the impact of the population aging. In particular, pension formulae have been modified to reduce the generosity of the systems and to induce longer working careers. In this paper we explore the capacity of these reforms to alleviate the expected financial difficulties of current PAYG systems. This is accomplished by developing and Heterogeneous Agents, Applied General Equilibrium model where individuals can freely adjust their retirement ages in response to the incentives provided by the pension regulations. This inclusion is relevant, as parametric changes tend to significantly alter retirement incentives. We find that the calibrated model successfully reproduces the basic stylized facts of retirement behavior in Spain. In particular, it mimics the early retirement pattern of low income workers under the effects of minimum pensions. The model is then used to explore the effects of several changes in pension formula, including the reform actually implemented in 1997. The general conclusion is that parametric changes can significantly improve the financial condition of the system, but are far away from being able to fully restoring it

Endogenous Retirement and Public Pension System Reform in Spain

All around the world, population aging has spurred developed countries to reform their PAYG pension systems. In particular, delaying legal retirement ages and reducing the generosity of pension benefits have been widely implemented changes. In this paper we assess how successful those policies can be in the case of the Spanish economy, and compare with the results obtained by the already implemented reforms (1997 and 2001). This evaluation is accomplished in a heterogeneous-agents, applied general equilibrium model where individuals can adjust their retirement ages in response to changes in pension rules. We check the ability of the model to reproduce the basic stylized facts of retirement behavior (specially the pattern of early retirement induced by minimum pensions). We then use to model to explore the impact of pension reforms. We find that already implemented changes actually increase the implicit liabilities of the system, while delaying the legal retirement age to 68 may roughly halve the size of the current pension debt.Pension System Reform, Applied General Equilibrium, Retirement.

Demographic change, pension reform and redistribution in Spain

Recent demographic changes have spurred pension reforms aimed at restoring the financial sustainability of PAYG systems. In Spain, the most significant reforms were undertaken in 1997 and in 2002, entailing an increase in the length of the averaging period in the pension formula, an increase in the penalties for early retirement and for retirement with short contributive records, a bonus for retirement after the age of 65, and a change in the eligibility conditions. In this paper we use an Applied General Equilibrium model populated by two-earners households to evaluate the redistributive impact of the pension system and the financial and welfare consequences of these reforms on households that differ in their education, region of residence and year of birth. The initial redistribution is assessed by comparing the internal rate of return provided to different households. We find that they vary considerable depending on education and cohort. Regarding the reforms, we find an increase in the implicit debt of the pension system after the reforms, and important changes in welfare. Households up to secondary education born between 1935 and 1975 are predicted to benefit from the reform, while the welfare of younger cohorts will be hit by higher taxes and unfavorable macroeconomic changes.Social Security, Pension Reform, Applied General Equilibrium, Redistribution

The effect of pension rules on retirement monetary incentives with an application to pension reforms in Spain

In this work we theoretically disentangle the effects of pension provisions on a variety of financial incentives to retirement, trying to reconcile them with some key Spanish retirement patterns. We find that the "average" individual, who is never affected by any cap of contributions or benefits, has weak incentives to retire early and strong incentives to retire at the normal retirement age. Alternatively, individuals at the bottom of the wage distribution have strong incentives to retire as early as possible, because ot the interaction between age-related penalties and the minimun pension. Both findings perfectly accommodate the retirement hazard of medium and low earners respectively. In contrast, high earners (those that have their contributions capped) despite having strong incentives to retire at the Early Retirement Age, do not do so. This is because, for those workers, financial incentives are not a good proxy for the marginal utility from working. Finally, we analyze the reasons behind the failure of the 1997 reform in improving the sustainability of the Spanish public pension system

THE EFFECT OF PENSION RULES ON RETIREMENT MONETARY INCENTIVES WITH AN APPLICATION TO PENSION REFORMS IN SPAIN

In this work we theoretically disentangle the effects of pension provisions on a variety of financial incentives to retirement, trying to reconcile them with some key Spanish retirement patterns. We find that the “average” individual, who is never affected by any cap of contributions or benefits, has weak incentives to retire early and strong incentives to retire at the normal retirement age. Alternatively, individuals at the bottom of the wage distribution have strong incentives to retire as early as possible, because ot the interaction between age-related penalties and the minimun pension. Both findings perfectly accommodate the retirement hazard of medium and low earners respectively. In contrast, high earners (those that have their contributions capped) despite having strong incentives to retire at the Early Retirement Age, do not do so. This is because, for those workers, financial incentives are not a good proxy for the marginal utility from working. Finally, we analyze the reasons behind the failure of the 1997 reform in improving the sustainability of the Spanish public pension system.

An evaluation of the life-cycle effects of minimum pensions on retirement behavior

In this paper we explore the effects of the minimum pension program on welfare and retirement in Spain. This is done with a stylized life-cycle model which provides a convenient analytical characterization of optimal behavior. We use data from the Spanish Social Security to estimate the behavioral parameters of the model and then simulate the changes induced by the minimum pension in aggregate retirement patterns. The impact is substantial: there is threefold increase in retirement at 60 (the age of first entitlement) with respect to the economy without minimum pensions, and total early retirement (before or at 60) is almost 50% larger.Retirement, life cycle model, minimum pension, structural estimation

Corpus-driven insights into the discourse of women survivors of Intimate Partner Violence

Despite its ubiquity, Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) is still under-researched from a Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) perspective. Thus, this paper investigates the discourse of women survivors of IPV focusing on a corpus-driven examination of the data. This is done after applying the text-analysis software tool LIWC (Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count) to a 120,000-word corpus collected from an anonymised, public, online forum available to IPV survivors. I contrast a plethora of linguistic phenomena in three online communities embedded within this forum (?Is it Abuse??, ?Getting out? and ?Life after abuse?) in the attempt to sketch out how the discursive output varies across these three stages. This paper shows how pronominal distribution plays a role in the forging of collective identity. Differences in the emotional tone across the three explored groups are also identified. Useful though these corpus-driven pointers may be, this study also warns of the precaution with which findings solely deriving from quantitative analyses need to be treated

The effect of pension rules on retirement monetary incentives with an application to pension reforms in Spain

In this work we theoretically disentangle the effects of pension provisions on a variety of financial incentives to retirement, trying to reconcile them with some key Spanish retirement patterns. We find that the «average» individual, who is never affected by any cap of contributions or benefits, has weak incentives to retire early and strong incentives to retire at the normal retirement age. Alternatively, individuals at the bottom of the wage distribution have strong incentives to retire as early as possible, as a result of the interaction between age-related penalties and the minimum pension. Both findings perfectly accommodate the retirement hazard of medium and low earners respectively. In contrast, high earners (those that have their contributions capped) do not retire early despite having strong incentives to do so. This is because, for those workers, financial incentives are not a good proxy for the marginal utility from working. Finally, we analyze the reasons behind the failure of the 1997 reform in improving the sustainability of the Spanish public pension system.retirement, Social Security, Monetary incentives, Pension Reform, Spain