Pension expectations, reforms and macroeconomic downturn in Italy. What can microdata tell us?

Massimo Baldini, Carlo Mazzaferro and Paolo Onofri

Applied Economics, 2019, vol. 51, issue 13, 1396-1410

Abstract: We use different years of the Bank of Italy’s Survey on Household Income and Wealth (SHIW) to explore how Italian workers’ expectations regarding their future level of pension benefits and retirement age changed from 2000 to 2014. Comparing expected and statutory values for future pension benefits and retirement ages, we find that knowledge of the pension system and its rules are not evenly distributed among workers. Some sections of the population, in particular, younger workers, women and the self-employed, are less precise in estimating their future pension benefits. As for retirement age, a large share of the working population still has not completely assimilated the implications of the linkage with the evolution of lifetime expectations at 65. Expectations in the final part of the period observed are dominated by increasing pessimism, which may be related to the macroeconomic crisis of the Italian economy and to the approval of a severe pension reform in 2011. Checking whether a household’s total wealth is consistent with lifetime consumption, we find that households where the head overestimates the future value of the pension benefit accumulate fewer resources than the remaining part of the population.

Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/00036846.2018.1527453 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:taf:applec:v:51:y:2019:i:13:p:1396-1410

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RAEC20

DOI: 10.1080/00036846.2018.1527453

Access Statistics for this article

Applied Economics is currently edited by Anita Phillips

More articles in Applied Economics from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().