Journal of the Economics of Ageing最新文献

The ageing of society means that public pension systems are becoming increasingly important. This study evaluates the influence of public pension entitlements on wealth inequality among pensioners. A novel data source - the Eurosystem Household Finance and Consumption Survey – is used to compare the impact of the public pension system on wealth inequality in 19 European countries. Findings indicate that in all investigated countries, social security wealth reduces wealth inequality. Augmented wealth inequality is ca. 30% lower than private wealth inequality. This estimate refers to the population of pensioners, while in the whole population the equalizing impact of public pension systems may be weaker. Social security wealth mitigates not only wealth inequality measured at the country level, but also wealth inequality in the whole European Union.

The ways that individuals experience time, specifically as it relates to prioritizing the present versus the future, have played foundational roles in economics and psychology.

Traditionally, both disciplines have viewed individuals’ time preferences as time-independent and stable. In this paper, we examine principles such as time consistency and rational expectations through the lens of socioemotional selectivity theory. We argue that preferences change as personal time horizons shrink, and rewards related to emotional meaning in the present are prioritized over rewards that play out in the future. This manifests in older individuals’ preferences for emotionally meaningful experiences over activities that promote learning and exploration. Because goals direct cognitive resources, individuals with shorter time horizons also direct cognitive resources and attention away from negative information and towards positive information. Shifting goals and changes in cognitive preferences have wide-ranging implications for aging research and policy development.

The objective of the paper is to examine the retirement behaviour of Belgian workers in one-earner households who are automatically granted a more generous old-age pension benefits replacement rate, called the household replacement rate. Following a recommendation of the Belgian Pension Reform Committee, this policy is to be suppressed for new pensioners, except for those receiving the minimum pension. We provide an ex-ante impact evaluation of such reform on both pension sustainability and adequacy measures. Specifically, we test whether the household replacement rate entails a work (dis)incentive mechanism promoting (harming) pension sustainability and furthermore, we analyse the role of the household replacement rate in old-age poverty and inequality measures. To do so, we use the survey dataset SHARE and a discrete time logistic duration model to study the link between retirement and financial retirement incentives created by the social security system. Further, we use a microsimulation model to estimate the magnitude of the assumed impact of the household replacement rate on retirement and we find that this policy generates higher retirement incentives through an income effect. At the same time, we simulate various social security wealth indicators under different household replacement rate scenarios and we find that the household replacement rate could potentially play an important role in decreasing the elderly poverty rate since households with asymmetrical working arrangements are often at the lowest part of the equivalized income distribution. Overall, despite the supposed positive poverty and distributional aspects of this policy, our simulation analysis supports the reform proposal of removing the household replacement rate.

In this paper we estimate the effect of unemployment on informal care provision. For the identification we use plant closures as a source of exogenous variation and combine difference-in-differences with matching based on entropy balancing. The analysis is based on data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP). We find that there is a time conflict between employment and informal care provision. Unemployment increases the probability of providing care by 2.9 percentage points while the daily hours of care provision rise by around 0.05 h per week-day. Both men and women react with significant increases in care provision. We find the largest effects for women with low education.

Based on five waves of CHARLS data from 2011 to 2020 with expenditure imputations, we estimate living standards and poverty rates among older Chinese and study factors associated with consumption and poverty. Our results indicate that in the 2010s, China's poverty profile among older people was no longer characterized by regional concentration, such as the case in the first decades following China's economic reforms. Rather, old-age poverty is dispersed and varies mainly by demographics. Rural-urban differences, low education, and older age are the main factors associated with poverty. In the past decade, people of these characteristics enjoyed substantially more reductions in poverty, but they remain chief predictors. After controlling for demographics, consumption grew by 72.9 %, and the poverty rate declined by 59.2 % from 2011 to 2020, revealing remarkable progress. By interacting marital status with sex and urban/rural residence, we identify gaps in older people's economic support and find that the never-married urban people, widowed and divorced women, especially divorced rural women are the most at risk for poverty. Our research implies that future poverty alleviation policies should have more precise targeting.

We study the causal effect of the introduction of caregiving respite in the form of hours of home help (caregiving supports) and financial subsidy (caregiving allowance) on the mental health of caregivers. We exploit evidence of a policy intervention that universalized previously means-tested caregiving subsidies and supports in Spain. Our estimates suggest evidence of an heterogeneous effect depending on the intensity of care provided. We find that caregiving supports reduce the probability of depressive symptoms among caregivers providing more than 50 hours of care. In contrast, caregiving subsidies give rise to a reduction in the probability of depressive symptoms among caregivers providing less than 50 hours of care. Consistently, we find evidence of an improvement in life satisfaction upon the receipt of subsidies and home supports . The latter effect is higher among part-time caregivers who spend between 20 and 50 caregiving hours/week which is explained by behavioural and preventive lifestyle changes. Finally, we estimate the ‘hypothetical caregiving subsidy’ amount that would have fully compensated caregivers’ for their wellbeing losses. We find estimates ranging between 800 and 850 euros/month, a magnitude well above the actual subsidy in Spain.

This study analyses the links between retirement and the distribution of intra-household wellbeing among Australian mixed-sex couples. We study the implications of own and partner’s retirement on measures of life satisfaction, financial satisfaction, and free time satisfaction using household panel data from Australia. We also measure the intertemporal effects of each partner’s retirement on wellbeing accounting for anticipation effects in the lead up to each partner’s retirement and possible adaptation effects in the years following each partner’s retirement. The results reveal evidence of gendered outcomes where in the long run, women’s retirement has negative implications on men’s free time satisfaction, while men’s retirement has negative implications on women’s financial satisfaction. On the other hand, in accordance with the hedonic treadmill model, both men and women adapt to changes in overall life satisfaction associated with their own or their partner’s retirement.

We explore the role of financial and pension information in increasing women’s knowledge and awareness of their future pension status and interest for pension information. We interview a representative sample of 801 Italian working women to assess their knowledge about pensions, financial issues and their own savings. The responses show that their knowledge and awareness of retirement planning is limited. We then run a randomized experiment to evaluate the effect of increased information regarding pensions on women’s awareness, knowledge, and behaviors. Women in the treated group are provided information in the form of three short online tutorials. A follow-up survey shows that these women become more interested and aware of pension schemes and retirement options after completing the tutorials and are more likely to be better informed and keener to obtain further information. When looking at changes in behavior, we find that treated women who are closer to retirement are more likely to believe that they would make different work-life decisions if they received specific pension information in a timely fashion. Middle-aged women are also more likely to have a supplementary pension fund if they are concerned about their standards of living after retirement.