Recent pension reforms, technological innovations as well as the Covid crisis are greatly impacting our society. These ongoing changes have fundamentally changed the demand for skills on the labor market and provide serious threats to the employability of older workers until their retirement and are likely to affect retirement behavior as well as savings behavior. While previous literature on retirement and pension communication has in particular focused on the vital question whether individuals are capable of processing financial information, little is known about how pension communication and pension reforms induce workers to make different choices for their career development well before they retire, and which investments in human capital are necessary to maintain employability.

The aim of this research project is therefore threefold. First, we will answer the question which role different kinds of pension information provision play in late career investments and savings intentions by means of a field experiment. Second, we will examine in detail to what extent pension reforms in combination with technological change affect employment, retirement and savings behavior of older workers in the Netherlands, and how this interaction might exacerbate the effect of pension reforms. Finally, we will investigate how workers can be motivated to continue to invest in their human capital. This project will introduce 2 field experiments of which the set-up already has been agreed upon with partners in field after careful talks to ensure feasibility within the project duration. Moreover, it will make use of stated preferences experiments which were recently conducted.

This project is funded and carried out under the auspices of Instituut Gak.