Bridging the Gap in Pension Participation: How Much Can Universal Tax-Deferred Pension Coverage Hope to Achieve?

Nadia Karamcheva and Geoffrey Sanzenbacher

No 7518, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: In light of the declining pension coverage of low-income workers, policy makers have discussed requiring all employers to offer individual retirement accounts, similar to defined contribution plans. How likely to participate are workers who currently do not have access to a pension plan? We address this question by using plausibly exogenous variation in pension-plan availability to estimate the determinants of participation in a standard selection on unobservables model. We find that currently uncovered low-income workers are fairly likely to participate in a newly offered plan, yet they are much less likely to do so than currently covered workers.

Keywords: self-selection; participation; private pensions; policy effects (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J08 J26 J32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 36 pages
Date: 2013-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age, nep-dem and nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published - published in: Journal of Pension Economics and Finance, 2014, 13 (4), 439-459

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp7518.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Bridging the gap in pension participation: how much can universal tax-deferred pension coverage hope to achieve? (2014)
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:dp7518

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 ().