Tatiana Pazem

Do households smooth consumption in response to pension reforms and if so, how? The answer to this question is unknown, yet important for aggregate and distributional reasons. I provide new evidence by using granular transaction and bank account data from a large French bank. First, I use a simulated instrument approach to reduce the dimensionality of pension reforms and isolate variation in pensions coming from the generosity of the pension rules across cohorts. I exploit this variation in a regression kink design and find that retirement consumption is essentially unaffected by changes in the generosity of the pension system, meaning that households perfectly smooth their consumption in response to pension reforms. While I find no evidence that households respond to pension reforms by adjusting their stock of private savings, I show that households essentially save through the pension system, by adjusting their labour supply close to retirement. These labour supply responses are large, and almost entirely compensate for changes in the generosity of the pension system. Lastly, I provide suggestive evidence that the consumption-smoothing welfare effects of pension reforms are small. First, using an event study design, I estimate that consumption drops by 3% at retirement. Second, I exploit a panel of lottery winners identified in the bank data and show that retired households have similar marginal propensities to consume as the general population.

What would the lives of women look like if they knew from an early age that they would not have children? Would they make different choices about human capital or early career investments? Would they behave differently in the marriage market? Would they fare better in the labor market? In this paper, we follow 152 women diagnosed with the Mayer-Rokitanski-Kuster-Hauser (MRKH) type I syndrome. This congenital condition, diagnosed at puberty, is characterised by the absence of the uterus in otherwise phenotypically normal 46, XX females. Using granular health registries matched with administrative data from Sweden, we confirm that MRKH is not associated with worse health, nor with differential pre-diagnosis characteristics, and that it has a large negative impact on the probability to ever live with a child. Relative to women from the general population, women with the condition have better educational outcomes, tend to marry and divorce at the same rate, but mate with older men, and hold significantly more progressive beliefs regarding gender roles. The condition has also very large positive effects on earnings and employment. Dynamics reveal that most of this positive effect emerges around the arrival of children in women in the general population, with little difference before. We also find that women with MRKH perform as well as men in the labor market in the long run. Results confirm that "child penalties" on the labor market trajectories of women are large and persistent and that they explain the bulk of the remaining gender gap.

We use anonymised transaction and bank data from France to document the evolution of consumption and savings dynamics since the onset of the pandemic. We find that consumption has dropped very severely during the nation-wide lockdown but experienced a strong and steady rebound during the Summer, before faltering in late September. This drop in consumption was met with a significant increase in aggregate households’ net financial wealth. This excess savings is extremely heterogenous across the income distribution: 50% of excess wealth accrued to the top decile. Households in the bottom decile of the income distribution experienced a severe decrease in consumption, a decrease in savings and an increase in debt. We estimate marginal propensities to consume and show that their magnitude is large, especially at the bottom of the income and liquidity distributions.