Professor Richard Disney

This paper considers the relevance of a set of generational accounts in informing policy debate in the UK.

The paper examines social security (public pension) reforms in which the programme is partially shifted from a public unfunded basis to a private, prefunded, basis.

This paper analyses retirement expectations and outcomes using the two waves of the UK Retirement Survey, undertaken in 1988-89 and 1994.

This commentary assesses the government's proposals. It provides a detailed description of the current pension system and asks whether there is a case for reform. It looks at how much pensioners are likely to benefit from the Minimum Income Guarantee and how the new State Second Pension compares with SERPS. It evaluates the government's plans for Stakeholder Pensions and presents new evidence on the employment, earnings and other savings of the people whom the government sees as targets for Stakeholder Pensions.

This Commentary looks at public pay in detail, tracing its trend relative to the private sector over the 1980s and 1990s and showing how the gap in pay between the public and private sectors differs dramatically across occupations, gender and education groups. These findings illustrate how misleading comparisons of public and private sector pay based on aggregate data can be.

This paper uses microeconomic data from the British Household Panel and General Household Surveys to describe how the distribution of pay differs between the public and private sectors in 1983 and in the early 1900s

This paper examines the asset positions of households at and around retirement in Britain using the Retirement Survey 'waves' of 1988-89 and 1994.

The issue of ageing and saving has two distinct facets. On the one hand, there is the individual issue.

The acquisition of rights by workers in private pension plans underpins retirement behaviour, recruitment policy and wage structure, but there is controversy as to how these individual pension rights should be valued.

The paper compares the change in pension plan coverage in the 1980s in the US and the UK.

Private pensions seem likely to provide the dominant source of income for the majority of retired workers in the future.

Individuals in the UK now face an effective choice between joining different types of pension plan.