The Politics of Aging and Retirement: Evidence from Swiss Referenda

Piera Bello () and Vincenzo Galasso

No 7165, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: Aging creates financial troubles for PAYG pension systems, since the share of retirees to workers increases. An often advocated policy response is to increase retirement age. Ironically, however, the political support for this policy may actually be hindered by population aging. Using Swiss administrative voting data at municipal level (and individual survey data) from pension reforms referenda, we show in fact that individuals close to retirement tend to oppose policies that postpone retirement, whereas young and elderly individuals are more favorable. The current process of population aging, and the associated increase in the size of the cohort of individuals close to retirement, may partially explain why a pension reform, which increased retirement age for females, was approved in two referenda in 1995 and 1998, while a reform, which proposed a similar increase in female retirement age, was defeated in a 2017 referendum.

Keywords: social security reforms; voting behavior; retirement age (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 H55 J18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age, nep-dem, nep-eur and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp7165.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The politics of ageing and retirement: Evidence from Swiss referenda (2021)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_7165

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().