Private pensions

Can't wait to get my pension: the effect of raising the female early retirement age on income, poverty and deprivation.

This paper exploits the gradual roll-out of the obligation for employers to enrol their employees into a pension to estimate its effect on how much is saved in workplace pensions for private sector employees.

This paper studies the first nationwide introduction of automatic enrolment, in which employers in the United Kingdom are obliged to enrol employees into a workplace pension scheme, which employees can then choose to leave if they wish.

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.

Private pension saving is a key component of retirement saving in the UK. The most recent data available shows that four-tenths of private household wealth is held in private pensions. Among those aged 55 to 64 nearly 73 percent had accumulated some private pension rights, with the median holding among those with some pension rights being £149,300 (Office for National Statistics 2015). This is partly explained by the fact that holding savings in pensions is, on average, tax favoured relative to other saving vehicles. The fact that large amounts are placed in private pensions also makes it important that the tax treatment of such savings is well-designed.

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.

The authors provide new empirical evidence on the importance of defined contribution pension wealth in England, and the nature of annuitization decisions taken by older adults who retire with such sources of wealth.

In this briefing note, we estimate the value of employer-provided pensions and compare their value between public and private sector workers, and over time. We then assess what effect the incorporation of the value of workplace pensions has on the estimated differential between remuneration in the public and private sectors when measured just using pay. We also document how this changes over time and how it varies across different groups of the population.

We analyse pension reforms for police officers in England and Wales using force-level data.

We examine ill-health retirement of police officers in England and Wales between 2002-3 and 2009-10.