What Are Some Unintended Consequences of Pension Reform?

Yasemin Özdemir

Aging populations have prompted many countries to reform pensions, to discourage people from retiring early and to keep working. In this video, YASEMIN ÖZDEMIR highlights the fact that pension reforms can have unforeseen effects which impact multiple generations. Foregrounding a 2006 Dutch reform which abolished an early retirement scheme for individuals born after 1950, Özdemir looks at how this policy affected families with children. As the policy made it unfeasible for many grandmothers born after 1950 to retire early, they were unable to take on childcare duties for their daughters. The range of spillover consequences of this policy observed by Özdemir included daughters working more, children having poorer educational outcomes and an increased gender discrepancy in terms of pay. The research highlights the importance for policymakers of considering the multigenerational spillover effects of their reforms, notably with regard to pensions.

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.21036/LTPUB101107

Researcher

Yasemin Özdemir is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bayreuth. Having completed her PhD at the University of Mannheim (2020), she has also pursued postdoctoral research at Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz. Her research focuses on social networks, applied microeconometrics and labor economics. Özdemir is a research affiliate of Collaborative Research Center Transregio 224.

University of Bayreuth (Universität Bayreuth)

The University of Bayreuth is a medium-sized campus university which is committed to the highest academic standards. As one of Germany’s youngest universities, it operates in an unbiased, self-confident spirit of academic freedom, scientific progress, and social responsibility. Top priorities are individual supervision, maintaining high academic standards, and creating programmes of study that take current research into account. The innovative collaboration between many of disciplines on the on the ‘Green Campus’ are key features of Bayreuth’s research culture. The University of Bayreuth is dedicated to interdisciplinary research. Its research facilities and infrastructure provide an ideal setting for scientific work. Focus areas – e.g. African studies, Polymer and Colloid Sciences, High Pressure and High Temperature Research, Ecology and the Environmental Sciences – combine the strengths of individual subject areas to address strategically chosen, cross-disciplinary research priorities. Foreign scholars rate Bayreuth as one of the most attractive universities in Germany, consistently placing it among the top institutions in the Humboldt Rankings.

Original Publication

Spillover Effects of Old-Age Pension across Generations: Family Labor Supply and Child Outcomes

Katja Kaufmann

Yasemin Özdemir

Han Ye

Published in 2022