Labor Supply and the Pension Contribution-Benefit Link

Eric French, Cambridge and IFS, Attila Lindner, UCL and IFS, Cormac O'Dea, Yale, NBER, IFS, and Tom Zawisza, OECD and IFS

We estimate the impact of public pension incentives on labor supply far from the normal retirement age by exploiting Poland’s switch from a Defined Benefit to a Notional Defined Contribution (NDC) scheme. This reform created a sharp cohort-based discontinuity in the link between current pension contributions and future benefits. Using this discontinuity and the universe of taxpayers, we estimate an employment elasticity with respect to the net return to work of 0.51 for men at ages 51-54. We estimate a lifecycle model to match these responses and discuss the broader implications of the reform. The shift to NDC reallocates work incentives over the lifecycle, strengthening incentives at younger ages, when labor supply is relatively inelastic, and weakening them at older ages, when labor supply is more elastic. This reallocation of work incentives tends to reduce aggregate lifecycle labor supply, which highlights the advantage of targeting pension incentives towards ages at which labor supply is most responsive.