Flexible Pension Systems - Postponed Retirement and Distributional Fairness

Abstract

This paper studies how both pension systems and well-being at work can be improved to postpone retirement in European households. Option values for retirement are constructed from a pool of four countries: Finland, Belgium, Germany and Spain, all relying on public-sector mandated pensions. The pooled estimation strategy diminishes the caveats of using an existing institutional setting to examine the incentives of introducing a new pension system. Pension reforms have to implement higher pension rights accruals than what has so far been introduced in pension reforms during the 2000s.