Public attitudes towards pensions

In this thesis we investigate what peoples opinions are with respect to the rise in individual responsibility for retirement provisions. Moreover, we will investigate whether people with different socio-economic backgrounds might tend to have different opinions. In our investigation we make use of the ordered probit and ordered logit models and their marginal effects. We will investigate if the resultsof the ordered probit model are robust against its distributional assumption, by extending the ordered probit model with a semi-nonparametric estimation of the distribution of the error terms. We find that the characteristics age, number of children and whether an individual lives in a rural or urban area are of influence to their opinion with respect to the rise in individual responsibility for retirement provision. By extending the ordered probit model, we come to the conclusion that the net income of the individual is of influence as well.