Why are older pensioners poorer?

We show that older male pensioners have substantially lower incomes than younger pensioners. There are a number of possible reasons for this including under-indexation of private pensions and the running down of income-producing assets. In fact we find that cohort differences more than account for the lower incomes of older pensioners in the sense that the mean income of older pensioners is actually higher than the mean income of the same cohort of pensioners when they were younger. We explore a number of possible reasons for this and conclude that it is driven by differential mortality between richer and poorer pensioners. We show how this manifests itself in a long time series of cross-sectional datasets.