Retirement Responses to a Generous Pension Reform: Evidence from a Natural Experiment in Eastern Europe
Alexander Danzer
No 4726, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)
Abstract:
The retirement decision is under researched in developing and emerging countries, despite the topic's close relation to many development issues such as poverty reduction and social security, and despite the fact that population ageing will increasingly challenge the developing world. This paper uses a natural experiment from Ukraine to estimate the causal effect of a threefold increase in the legal minimum pension on labor supply and retirement behaviour at older ages. Applying difference-in-difference and regression discontinuity methods on two independent nationally representative data sets, the paper estimates a pure income effect that caused additional retirement of 30 to 47 percent. Additional evidence suggests that retirement incentives are stronger at the lower tail of the educational distribution and that the strict Labor Code curbed responses at the intensive labor supply margin. Although the substantial pension increase provided strong disincentives to work and put a heavy fiscal burden on Ukraine, it significantly reduced the propensity of falling into poverty for those in retirement.
Keywords: minimum pension; poverty; retirement; difference-in-differences; regression discontinuity; pure income effect; labor supply (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I38 J26 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 66 pages
Date: 2010-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age, nep-lab and nep-tra
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)
Published - revised version published as 'Benefit Generosity and the Income Effect on Labour Supply: Quasi-Experimental Evidence' in: Economic Journal, 2013, 123 (571), 1059-1084
Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp4726.pdf (application/pdf)
Related works:
Working Paper: Retirement Responses to a Generous Pension Reform: Evidence from a Natural Experiment in Eastern Europe (2010) 
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:iza:izadps:dp4726
Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().