State pensions

We document employment rates of older men and women in the UK over the last forty years. In both cases growth in employment since the mid 1990s has been stronger than for younger age groups. On average, older men are still less likely to be in work than they were in the mid 1970s although this is not true for those with low education. We highlight issues with using years of schooling as a measure of educational achievement for analysing labour market trends at older ages, not least because a large proportion of men who left school at young ages without any formal qualifications, have subsequently acquired some.

In this paper we describe the history of state pension policy in the UK since the introduction of the State Pension in 1948. We calculate simple summary measures of the generosity of the system over time and of the degree to which the system has created implicit taxes on, or subsidies to, work at older ages.

Can't wait to get my pension: the effect of raising the female early retirement age on income, poverty and deprivation.

This paper describes all the main benefits in the UK system, giving details of rates and allowances, as well as numbers and types of claimants and levels of expenditure.

More work is needed to distinguish precautionary saving motives from other motives, such as the desire to leave bequests. In this paper, progress toward disentangling these motivations has been made by matching other features of the data, such as public and private insurance choices.

We examine the impact of increasing the early retirement age (ERA) for women in a context where the financial incentive to retire at the ERA is very limited.

We estimate the changing value of workplace pensions in the UK and incorporate their value into an estimate of the public sector pay differential.

We investigate the impact of inheritances and gifts received on the distribution of wealth. Whereas previous work has looked only at marketable wealth, we consider broader measures of wealth including state and private pensions.

This briefing provides an overview of the evolution of the British benefits system over the last half-century, describing both long-run trends and more recent changes.

This paper received the 2017 Atkinson Award. The award is named Tony Atkinson, who was the founding editor of JPubE in 1972 and served as editor for 26 years, and is given every other year to the best paper published in the Journal of Public Economics.

In this paper, we use detailed data on households’ histories of employment, earnings and contributions to the National Insurance (NI) system to examine the degree of intragenerational redistribution achieved by the UK state pension system for the cohort born in the 1930s.