How Do Public Pensions Affect Retirement Incomes and Expenditures? Evidence over Five Decades from Canada
2014/08/12
研討會日期 : 2014-08-12
時間 : 14:30
主講人 : Professor Kevin Milligan
主持人 : Professor C.C. Yang
地點 : Conference Room B110
演講者簡介 : Professor Milligan received his Ph.D. in Economics from University of Toronto at 2001. He is currently an Associate Professor at The University of British Columbia. His research spans the fields of public and labour economics, with a focus on the economics of children and the elderly, as well as other tax and labour market policy topics.
演講摘要 : In this paper, we study the impact of Canada's public pension system on the income and expenditures of the elderly from 1960 to 2010. Our analysis reveals three important findings. First, we document that the expansion of Canada's public pension system over the last 50 years has coincided with a large improvement in elderly living standards, measured by income or consumption. Second, we causally relate these changes using an instrumental variables strategy exploiting variation across ages and years in the Canadian system. We find strong evidence that public pensions have lifted income. For expenditures, the evidence is more mixed but there is strong evidence of improvements in reducing expenditure poverty. Third, taking our estimates on the effect of income poverty we perform counterfactual simulations by applying the public pension system of different decades to the data from the 2000s. We find that the 2010 system reduces relative income poverty by 88 percent relative to the system in 1960, for those aged 70 to 79. For relative expenditure poverty, the corresponding reduction is 56 percent.
