Video: WIFO Research Seminar with Andreas Haller (Norwegian School of Economics)
On 9 November 2022, Andreas Haller presented his conclusions on how an increase in the statutory retirement age may
affect social security systems at the WIFO Research Seminar. WIFO economist Benjamin Bittschi commented on the lecture afterwards.
WIFO Research Seminar, Österreichisches Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung, Wien, 09.11.2022 12:30, https://tinyurl.com/3kscdsk3
Organised by: Austrian Institute of Economic Research
Online since: 24.10.2022 0:00
Policy makers around the world have implemented pension reforms – increasing statutory retirement ages and/or adjusting pension
formulas – to ease the demographic burden on pay-as-you-go social security systems. Andreas Haller's paper provides a unifying
framework to evaluate the welfare effects of pension reforms using a sufficient statistics approach. He shows that the welfare
effects of any reform rest crucially on the "multiplier" – the total fiscal effect relative to the mechanical fiscal effect
of a reform. Multipliers can be readily estimated with reduced-form methods using data on contributions to and transfers from
the entire welfare state system. To illustrate his framework, he exploits a series of pension reforms in Austria. Andreas
Haller finds that increasing the early retirement age has a multiplier of 0.4 to 0.7. By contrast, reducing pension generosity
generates a multiplier of 1.4 to 1.7. In the Austrian context, he finds that reducing pension generosity is preferable to
increasing the early retirement age to curb social security expenditures.