Does Homeownership Partly Explain Low Participation in Supplementary Pension Schemes?
28 Pages Posted: 29 Aug 2015
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Does Homeownership Partly Explain Low Participation in Supplementary Pension Schemes?
Does Homeownership Partly Explain Low Participation in Supplementary Pension Schemes?
Date Written: September 9, 2014
Abstract
We used nine waves of the Bank of Italy’s Survey on Household income and Wealth (1995-2012) to investigate a possible trade-off between homeownership and individual participation in a supplementary pension scheme. Italy lends itself to this type of investigation because the Italian public pension system has been heavily reformed in the period, providing in principle incentives for participation, and the homeownership rate is very high. The impact of homeownership is captured in two ways: by a dummy for being homeowner and by an index defined as the share of housing wealth over total wealth. Our results show that indeed, after controlling for a vast array of socio-economic characteristics and allowing for unobserved individual heterogeneity, both measures of homeownership are negatively associated with participation in supplementary pension schemes and that such an effect does not disappear even after the 2007 reform.
Keywords: pension plan participation, retirement planning, housing investment
JEL Classification: D91, H55
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation