Retirement, HR and worker behavior
Our project will combine two lines of research. The first line of research will focus on how labor supply at older ages responds to changes in pension schemes, and how individuals form their retirement decisions in such a dynamic environment. In particular, we will focus on the causal effects directly after the reform on retirement intentions, and how these intentions compare to actual retirement behavior and individual pension rights. The project builds on unique matched administrative-survey panels we develop in collaboration with APG for the public, education and privatized sector. These panels enable us to analyze general as well as heterogeneous effects of two pension reforms (abolishment of the FPU-pension rights and the postponement of AOW eligibility), and to identify the main mechanisms behind deviations between individual intentions and realizations. A major advantage of this approach is that these reforms create natural experiments with exogenous variation in pension wealth between different age groups.
In the second research line, we will investigate whether and how HR-policies can affect employees’ pension awareness, retirement intentions as well as their performance and employability. It is important to study how employers respond to the changes in pension schemes, and to what extent their HR-policies affect their employees’ retirement decisions. For this purpose, we will develop linked employer-employee panels that include detailed information on HR-policies applied by employers, organization characteristics, as well as employees’ individual retirement preferences and intentions. Subsequently, we will analyze the causal effects of two randomized field experiments in collaboration with ActuIT and PGGM which will focus on the effects of (1) information tools on employees’ decision on part-time retirement and (2) a training that focuses on changing line managers’ attitudes towards older workers enabling them to improve the self-esteem of the older workers they are managing. These two studies will take account of possible heterogeneous effects for different types of employees.
