The Limited Power of Socioeconomic Status to Predict Longevity: Implications for Pension Policy

Arno Baurin ()

No 2020019, LIDAM Discussion Papers IRES from Université catholique de Louvain, Institut de Recherches Economiques et Sociales (IRES)

Abstract: Differences of life expectancy across socioeconomic status are well-documented and many economists argue that they should be taken into account when designing pension systems. This paper analyses the relevance of using socioeconomic characteristics to differentiate retirement age. Using US mortality rate assembled by Chetty et al. (2016), we simulate the longevity distribution both across and within socioeconomic status. Then, we analyze the power of socioeconomic status to predict individuals' longevity. Results suggest that socioeconomic status has relatively limited predictive power, due to the huge within status longevity variance.

Keywords: Pension policy; Pension progressivity; Longevity; Tagging (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D63 H55 J14 J18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-06-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age, nep-lab and nep-pbe
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://sites.uclouvain.be/econ/DP/IRES/2020019.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:ctl:louvir:2020019

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LIDAM Discussion Papers IRES from Université catholique de Louvain, Institut de Recherches Economiques et Sociales (IRES) Place Montesquieu 3, 1348 Louvain-la-Neuve (Belgium). Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Virginie LEBLANC ().