Voting on pensions: sex and marriage

Marie-Louise Leroux, Pierre Pestieau and Maria Racionero

No 2009057, LIDAM Discussion Papers CORE from Université catholique de Louvain, Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (CORE)

Abstract: Existing political economy models of pensions focus on age and productivity. In this paper we incorporate two additional individual characteristics: sex and marital status. We ignore the role of age, by assuming that people vote at the start of their life, and characterize the preferred rate of taxation that finances a Beveridgean pension scheme when individuals differ in wage, sex and marital status. We allow for two types of couples: one-breadwinner and two-breadwinner couples. Marriage pools both wage and longevity differences between men and women. Hence singles tend to have more extreme preferred tax rates than couples. We show that the majority voting outcome depends on the relative number of one-breadwinner couples and on the size of derived pension rights.

Keywords: social security; differential longevity; majority voting; individualization of pension rights (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 D78 H55 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009-09-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age, nep-cdm and nep-pol
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Voting on pensions: Sex and marriage (2011)
Working Paper: Voting on pensions: sex and marriage (2011)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cor:louvco:2009057

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