This paper investigates the redistributive aspects of the Italian pension system. Using rich, population-wide administrative data from the INPS archives, we document that the median replacement rate at retirement is approximately 77% for men and 71% for women. A rank-rank analysis reveals that individuals ending their labor market careers in the bottom 30% of the labor income distribution tend to improve their relative position upon retirement. This upward shift is observed for both men and women. However, in the upper 60% of the labor income distribution, individuals tend to experience a relatively uniform decline in rank, rather than a steeper drop among top earners. These findings suggest that the Italian pension system provides moderate redistribution, primarily benefiting lower earners without sharply penalizing those at the top.

This study proposes a Pension Fragility Index (PFI), a novel metric of economic vulnerability centered on public pension income. We classify a retiree as fragile if her income from old-age or early retirement pension falls below 60% of the nation-level median. We use internationally comparable data from Wave 9 of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe to argue that the PFI effectively identifies individuals particularly susceptible to episodes of economic vulnerability. Pension fragility is not a random shock occurring after retirement but rather the outcome of the labour market trajectories experimented over the life course. From a policy perspective, quantifying the risk of pension fragility before retirement is crucial for targeting preventive measures. Using INPS administrative data, we develop a microeconometric model to forecast pension fragility among Italian retirees. Preliminary results highlight the central role of labour earnings in shaping this risk. However, conditional on earnings, a longer contribution history to the pension system significantly reduces the fragility risk for both men and women.

The paper aims to investigate the role of occupation-specific health hazards as potential drivers of individual choices regarding labour supply and pathways to retirement. We argue that health hazards shape labour market trajectories through the effect that job stressors have on health.

We investigate the relationship between exposure to job stressors and health, computing two sets of indicators: one at the individual level, aiming to proxy individual health, and one at the occupational level, aiming to capture the job features expected to impact health the most.

We construct synthetic indicators for individual physical health and cognitive functioning using SHARE data on self-reported health and healthcare, as well as cognitive ability, to identify the factors that better capture ageing-related health deterioration.

Using O*Net data, we identify those occupation-specific features that mostly impact the worker’s health, and compute health hazards for each occupation. We match individual-level information from SHARE with occupational hazards using the ISCO codes and the ISCO-O*Net crosswalk.

The empirical analysis examines the impact of job stressors on labour force participation and retirement choices, as measured by indicators of working status transitions over a two-year period.

To shed light on the channels, we examine the role of occupational risks in contributing to health deterioration, exploring the heterogeneity of health profiles across occupations.

Understanding the role of occupational risks in shaping labour market choices may enhance the implementation of targeted policies to support the most at-risk workers, thereby favouring active ageing at work and facilitating smooth transitions to retirement.

This paper revisits the concept of the implicit pension debt (IPD) in pay-as-you-go (PAYGO) pension systems and proposes a simplified and analytically tractable framework to measure it. Under stationary and balanced demographic and economic conditions, IPD can be expressed as the product of three intuitive factors: the average pension benefit (P), the number of pensioners (S), and the average age gap (D) between when contributions are paid and pensions are received. During expansion phases, PAYGO systems are known to produce quasi-capital gains: the proposed formula sheds new light on why they arise.

The paper also explores a novel extension of the IPD concept to include intergenerational transfers towards children. These “downward” transfers can offset part of the traditional pension burden. This broader view of PAYGO systems as intergenerational transfer mechanisms offers a promising avenue to improve sustainability and fairness in ageing societies. The proposed framework supports clearer diagnostics and better-informed policy responses to demographic decline.