An attempt to unravel the complexities of pension policy in the UK, including financial, fiscal, labour-market and income-distribution analyses of the retirement-income system. This book, drawing on five years’ IFS research, was widely praised. A Financial Times editorial observed that ‘The...

The object of this paper is to examine the impact of type of pension scheme on retirement behaviour. The well-documented decline in the labour-force participation of older women and older men (in particular) is common to most industrialised countries. The proportion of men aged 55 to 64 in...

While personal-pension mis-selling dominated the headlines, just as costly was the over-compensation offered to younger workers to contract out of the state scheme into personal pensions. The proposal for age-related rebates outlined in this book was later taken up by the government.

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This report surveys a dozen international comparative studies of poverty, income distribution and the elderly in OECD countries. It updates a previous Department of Social Security report — Whiteford and Kennedy, 1995, based on data from the mid- to late-1980s — including information up to...

The redistributive potential of state intervention is limited by the ability of individuals to contract-out of public provision. This issue is examined in the context of the UK pension scheme, using evidence for a cohort of men drawn from a sample of over 30,000 simulated individual lifetime...