State pensions

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.

This paper studies the impact on employment over the period when the female state pension age rose to age 62.

We use a unique data set combining lifetime National Insurance contribution histories with detailed micro data from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing to look at who will benefit from the introduction of the single-tier state pension.