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Why are Older Pensioners Poorer?
Author(s) -
Johnson Paul,
Stears Gary
Publication year - 1998
Publication title -
oxford bulletin of economics and statistics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.131
H-Index - 73
eISSN - 1468-0084
pISSN - 0305-9049
DOI - 10.1111/1468-0084.00101
Subject(s) - cohort , older people , indexation , demographic economics , economics , differential (mechanical device) , demography , gerontology , medicine , monetary economics , sociology , monetary policy , engineering , aerospace engineering
We show that older male pensioners have substantially lower incomes than younger pensioners. There are a number of possible reasons for this including under‐indexation of private pensions and the running down of income producing assets. In fact we find that cohort differences more than account for the lower incomes of older pensioners in the sense that the mean income of older pensioners is actually higher than the mean income of the same cohort of pensioners when they were younger. We explore a number of possible reasons for this and conclude that it is driven by differential mortality between richer and poorer pensioners. We show how this manifests itself in a long time series of cross‐sectional datasets.