Fertility decisions and pension reforms. Evidence from natural experiments in Italy

Francesco Billari and Vincenzo Galasso

IdEP Economic Papers from USI Università della Svizzera italiana

Abstract: The emergence of old-age social security has been linked to general fertility decline, and in recent years pension reforms have emerged as a response to the challenges of population ageing, in turn partially a consequence of fertility decline. Understanding the link between social security and low fertility is therefore very important. In this paper we analyse the link between fertility and social security in a novel way. We exploit a series of pension reforms that were implemented in Italy, one of the first ‘lowest-low’ fertility societies, during the 1990s, to test the effect of expected retirement income on fertility. The design of the reforms, which introduced a discontinuity depending on the numbers of years of contributions, allows considering them as a natural experiment. We analyse fertility data reconstructed from a series of surveys from the Bank of Italy and show that couples in which the husband was affected by the reform, therefore facing a lower pension, had subsequently higher fertility.

Keywords: old-age security; quantity-quality trade-off; public pension systems; fertility; altruism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D64 H55 J13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 38 pages
Date: 2014-04-18
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age, nep-eur and nep-his
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
http://doc.rero.ch/record/209824/files/WP1403.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:lug:wpidep:1403

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IdEP Economic Papers from USI Università della Svizzera italiana
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Alessio Tutino ().