Leader: Giulia Giupponi (Bocconi); Other collaborator(s): UNIBA
Demographic trends are exerting rampant pressure on the fiscal sustainability of pay-as-you-go public pension systems, with important implications for intergenerational inequality. There is growing consensus around the fact that support for redistributive policies is largely shaped by individual perceptions of inequality and understanding of economic policies. However, even though social security is now the largest and fastest growing component of government expenditure in most OECD countries, we still know little about how individuals think about retirement policy and intergenerational inequality. In this project, we plan to study how individuals understand retirement policy, what their beliefs are about the appropriate link about contributions and entitlements, and what their preferences for intergenerational inequality are. We will use a large-scale survey collecting information on public opinions in Italy and other OECD countries. We will exploit information treatments and other survey experiments to understand the role of information and perceptions for the formation of intergenerational redistributive preferences.
Brief description of the activities and of the intermediate results: We collected and analyzed data from a preliminary survey on individual preferences over pension policy. The objective of this initial analysis is to develop a methodological tool, which allows us to elicit individual beliefs and preferences over public policies, and in particular over pension policies. Following a recent literature, we used open question to obtained individual beliefs about the consequences of recent pension reforms and preferences over retirement policies. We performed a randomized experiment to examine whether individuals are more likely to respond to open questions when they need to type their answer or when they can record it and whether the informative content of the answers differ. We are currently analyzing the data.
Main policy, industrial and scientific implications: in progress.
We use data from a preliminary survey that we run on individual preferences over pension policy to study how the perception of the policy is influenced by political priming. We used answers to open-ended questions to collect the respondents’ individual perceptions about a well-known pension policy – Quota 100 – that has been largely criticized for not being fair towards younger generations. The political priming consisted of mentioning that the pension reform was proposed by one political party, the League. Respondents were randomly assigned to either the question with no mentioning of the political party (our control group) or to the question that mentioned the political party. Our results show political polarization. Respondents who reported voting for the League were more in favor of Quota 100 when politically primed, while the opposite occurred for respondents supporting other parties. These results suggest that the support for pension policy may not depend on the content of the policy, but rather on the political affiliation.
Coming soon