Research

Increasing the employment rate of individuals aged 55+ is a key challenge in many OECD countries. While labour market discrimination and policy measures have been put forward as possible explanations, the role of job search remains largely unexplored. Yet, it determines to a large extent the match between supply and demand on the labour market. In this paper we examine age-related differences in job search behaviour. As skills have often become outdated for older workers, but job mobility may enhance their employment, we analyse search behaviour for the unemployed as well as the employed adopting multiple parameters: job search intensity, use of the public employment agency (PES) and social networking. The results indicate that jobseekers of different age employ different search methods, and that this relationship should be analysed within the employment context of the jobseeker.

This paper examines whether the child penalty in wages extends to employer provided pensions. Using longitudinal administrative data on employer pensions in Belgium, this paper estimates the impact of first childbirth and family size on pension participation and savings for the current population at working age. The results show that within one to three years after childbirth, mothers experience a 15% decline in employer pension contributions. This decline reflects reductions in both employer and employee contributions, driven by sharp drops in gross wages and working hours following childbirth. Because pension savings are cumulative, this reduction in contributions results in a long-term child penalty. The effect is similar for mothers regardless of parental leave uptake.

Using data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement (SHARE), this paper examines occupational pension income and coverage gaps between men and women. The focus is on a group of countries with comparable occupational pension regulations: Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands and Switzerland. The results show that after accounting for observable characteristics, over half of the gender gap in occupational pension coverage is explained, largely driven by women's shorter careers, greater part-time work and lower wages. Factors driving this gap remain constant across birth cohorts. Conditional on receiving an occupational pension, women receive nearly 40 percent less occupational pension income than men, partly due to part-time work and industry of employment. Selection into pension receipt has only a limited impact on the gender pension gap. While pension coverage gap decomposition shows little variation across countries, this is not the case for the gender pension gap, notably with cross-country differences in part-time work.

The aim of this study is to estimate individual’s willingness to pay for pension benefits. To this end, we conducted a discrete choice experiment among workers in the United Kingdom, using fictitious job advertisements. Our results show that the majority of workers is willing to sacrifice pay for pension benefits. The marginal worker is willing to forego 0.3% of their current wage for an increase in pension benefits of 1 percentage point. Furthermore, there are important heterogeneities in the willingness to pay: men have higher willingness to pay than women, and willingness to pay increases as workers get closer to the retirement age and as income increases. Our mediation analysis shows that worker’s valuation of future pension benefits can be explained by differences in risk aversion, financial time horizon and financial literacy.