Instrumenty polityki prorodzinnej a stabilność systemu emerytalnego

Info: 

W większości krajów rozwiniętych spadająca dzietność i wydłużające się dalsze trwanie życia powodują wzrost presji fiskalnej. Subsydiowanie dzietności i reformy systemów emerytalnych są dwoma sposobami łagodzenia skutków obserwowanych zmian demograficznych. Oba rozwiązania nastręczają pewnych trudności. Wiążą się z wysokimi krótkookresowymi kosztami i korzyściami, które odczują dopiero przyszłe pokolenia. Ocena ich efektywności nie jest, więc rzeczą łatwą.

W literaturze często analiza tych polityk przebiega w pełni niezależnie. Badacze koncentrujący się na reformach systemu emerytalnego pomijają endogeniczny charakter dzietności. Z kolei ci analizujący narzędzia polityk prorodzinnych upraszczają dalece system emerytalny. Polityki społeczne są systemem naczyń połączonych i zmiana w jednym obszarze pociąga dostosowania w pozostałych. Preferowana forma systemu emerytalnego zależy od struktury demograficznej, a indywidualnie optymalny poziom dzietność może być determinowany przez skale internalizacji korzyści z potomstwa wbudowaną w system emerytalny. Z tego powodu, warto opłacalność reform emerytalnych czy prorodzinnych analizować łącznie.

 


Population aging is an irreversible global trend with far-reaching economic and socio-political consequences. Fertility declines and rising life expectancy increase fiscal pressure. Subsidizing fertility and reforming pension systems remain two ways of mitigating the effects of observed demographic changes. Both solutions cause some difficulties. They are associated with significant short-term costs and benefits which only future generations will experience. The assessment of their effectiveness is not so easy. In order to properly address this issue, there is not only a vast empirical literature on the historic evolution of the reform effectiveness, but also a whole collection of theoretical approaches to understand its consequences for welfare and fiscal stability.

In the literature, the analysis of these policies is often completely independent. Researchers focusing on pension reforms ignore the endogenous nature of fertility. On the other hand, those analyzing the pro-family policies oversimplify the pension system. Social policies are communicating vessels, and a change in one area will attract adjustments in the other. The preferred form of the pension system depends on the demographic structure. Simultaneously the optimal level of fertility can be determined by the scales internalizing the benefits of offspring built into the pension system. For this reason, it is worth analyzing the profitability of the pension and family-friendly reforms jointly.

 

Budget: 

Źródło finansowania | Financing : Dimentowy Grant, Ministerstwo Nauki i Szkolnictwa Wyższego

Projekt realizowany | Timeline : 11/2016-11/2020

Budżet łączny | Total budget: 179 877 zł

  • wynagrodzenia dla podstawowych wykonawców | compensation to researchers: 120 000 zł
  • komputery i oprogramowanie (m.in. licencje Fortran) | hardware and software (incl. Fortran): 14 560 zł
  • konferencje i inne wyjazdy | conference travels: 23 000 zł
  • materiały + promocja | consumables + visibility: 2 400 zł
  • koszty pośrednie dla UW | overheads for UW: 17 988 zł
Purpose: 

Chabe-Ferret i Gobbi (2016) pokazali w oparciu o dane dla USA, że wzrost ryzyka dochodowego tłumaczy obserwowany spadek dzietności. Ponadto ryzyko dochodowe potęguje znaczenie redystrybucji i elementu ubezpieczeniowego w systemie emerytalnym tym samym przekłada się na jego optymalną formę, Nishiama i Smetters (2007, QJE). Uwzględnienie ryzyka w analizie polityk prorodzinnych zapoczątkowała w swojej pracy Sommer (2017, JME). Praca pomija jednak nieneutralność fiskalna systemu emerytalnego a analiza jest prowadzona jedynie w stanie ustalonym. Uniemożliwiając tym sam analizę efektówdobrobytowych wprowadzenia omawianych polityk. Głównym celem projektu jest rozbudowanie modelu Sommmer (2017) o fiskalne nieneutralny system emerytalny, ścieżkę przejścia pomiędzy systemami emerytalnymi oraz instrumenty fiskalne bezpośredniego wspierania dzietności. Pozwoli to zweryfikować hipotezę czy: zwiększenie dzietności do poziomu społecznie optymalnego za pomocą instrumentów polityki prorodzinnej podnosi dobrobyt społeczny.


As Chab ́e-Ferret and Gobbi (2016) show empirically increase in the income volatility is a significant component of observed fertility drop. Income shock also emphasis redistributive and insurance role of the pension system. Therefore affect optimal pension system form, Nishiama and Smetters (2007, QJE). The inclusion of the impact of income shocks on fertility represents a modern trend initiated in the work of Sommer (2017, JME). The core objective of the project is to expand the Sommer (2017) model by a fiscally non-neutral pension system and implementing the transition path between pension systems and fiscal instruments for direct fertility support. This will confirm the hypothesis if increasing fertility to the socially optimal level by means of family policy instruments raises social welfare.

Opublikowane | Published

  • The importance of family: a macroeconomic perspective | Pensions today - economic, managerial, and social issues (book chapter)

    Plenty of economic phenomena cannot be explained in the absence of family structure. For example, the immense changes in women's labor force participation are strongly affected by family structure: married women work less than single, and mothers work less than childless women (Greenwood et al. 2017). A significant share of these differences is a result of the family-specific design of tax and social security systems (Borella et al. 2019). Family structure is also a natural framework for studying intergenerational mobility and parent-child correlations. More and more macroeconomics papers reconcile the importance of a family and explicitly model decisions within the household. In this paper, we propose a systematic overview of this stream of literature.

    We are not the first ones to review family economics in the context of macroeconomics, e.g. Browning et al. (2014). Doepke and Tertilt (2016) provide an excellent summary of advances in family economics and its successes in explaining classic macroeconomics phenomena. We extend their study by focusing on family-dependent policy interventions, the joint aspect of taxation, and the impact of labor market structure on fertility. What is more, an outstanding guideline of family economics models by Greenwood et al. (2017) pointed out several remaining research questions – concerning childcare subsidies, fertility policies, taxation, and within-family insurance. We prove that many of them have already received a satisfactory empirical and theoretical answer.

    The definition of family differs substantially across macroeconomics literature. However, we can systematize these definitions using two dimensions: the household structure and decision process. We can distinguish two types of households: the first consists of the parent(s) and child(ren), the second consists of husband and wife. The latter fits analyzing gender inequality, unequal tax treatment, or family-dependent components of social security. The parent(s) and child(ren) family structure is the most common and helps explaining human capital accumulation, inequality, and fertility decisions. Both setups are employed to study different drivers of women's labor force participation.

    In terms of the decision-making process, we can distinguish unitary households and households based on game-theoretic bargaining models. The members of the unitary household maximize the so-called household utility function, which describes the joint interests of all household members under aggregated budget constraint. However, the formation, as well as the dissolution of a partnership, usually require decisions of the individuals involved. Thus, it always contains the possibility of conflict. Bargaining models better reflect this feature and describe household behavior as the cooperation of utility-maximizing individuals. Despite that, the unitary household is a typical framework, even in recent literature. Models with bargaining are mostly used to describe the formation and stability of marriage and recently to analyze fertility decisions.

    In the following part of the paper, we review both macroeconomics and family economics literature in the context of labor force participation, fertility choice, human capital accumulation, inequality and taxes, and social security. Depending on the policy in question, the literature proposes models with significantly different structures and features, e.g., types of heterogeneity, choice set, applied utility functions, and model timing. All of them contribute to the mechanism of the model and its fit to the data (Borella et al. 2018). We discuss below different model setups, with particular caution to policies' welfare effect. In this way, we provide a method guideline useful for future research.

    This chapter is a part of volume "Pensions today - economic, managerial, and social issues" edited by Filip Chybalski and Edyta Marcinkiewicz.

    Oliwia
    Komada
    Magda
    Malec

W toku | Work in progress

  • Welfare and macroeconomic effects of family policies: insights from an OLG model

    What are the welfare and macroeconomic effects of family policies and how do they depend on policy composition? I answer those questions in overlapping generations model calibrated to the US. I account for the idiosyncratic income risk, redistribution via social security, and tax and benefit system. I explicitly model child-related tax credit, child care subsidies, and child allowance. I show the expansion of the family policy yields higher welfare. The expenditure on the optimal policy accounts for approximately 3% of GDP. Even though the optimal family policy is three times bigger than the status quo policy, taxes decrease when the optimal policy is implemented. Therefore, reform is self-financing. The structure of family policy is crucial for welfare evaluation. Tax credit and child allowance generate higher welfare gains than child care.

    Oliwia
    Komada