Pension Entitlements and Wealth Accumulation

Variation in non-pension wealth accumulation with the level of expected pensions is investigated with a register based, linked employer-employee dataset. This includes wealth components, earnings history and demographic information, supplemented with detailed calculations of public and occupational pension entitlements, allowing construction of full life time income trajectories. Regressions are run on the half of the population with some wealth and therefore the option of consumption smoothing. The results imply substantial offsets of pension wealth against other private wealth, mostly financial. Although pension benefits are related to earnings, the regressive structure of the public pension and incomplete coverage of occupational pensions provide independent variation in pensions. Panel estimation provides support for the cross section results. Heterogeneity and selection bias are investigated with estimation on a variety of sub-samples.