risks Article Automatic Indexation of the Pension Age to Life Expectancy: When Policy Design Matters † Mercedes Ayuso 1,*,‡ , Jorge M. Bravo 2,‡ , Robert Holzmann 3,‡ and Edward Palmer 4,‡ 1 Department of Econometrics, Statistics and Applied Economy, Riskcenter-UB, University of Barcelona, 08034 Barcelona, Spain 2 NOVA IMS Universidade Nova de Lisboa, MagIC, and Université Paris-Dauphine PSL, and CEFAGE-UE, 1070 Lisbon, Portugal;
[email protected] 3 Austrian National Bank, and Austrian Academy of Sciences, and Australian Centre of Excellence in Population Ageing Research, CEPAR@UNSW, 1090 Vienna, Austria;
[email protected] 4 Uppsala Center for Labor Studies and Department of Economics, SE-751 20 Uppsala, Sweden;
[email protected] * Correspondence:
[email protected] † This paper is an extended and revised version of the conference paper presented at WorldCIST’21. ‡ These authors contributed equally to this work. Abstract: Increasing retirement ages in an automatic or scheduled way with increasing life expectancy at retirement is a popular pension policy response to continuous longevity improvements. The question addressed here is: to what extent is simply adopting this approach likely to fulfill the overall goals of policy? To shed some light on the answer, we examine the policies of four countries that have recently introduced automatic indexation of pension ages to life expectancy–The Netherlands, Denmark, Portugal and Slovakia. To this end, we forecast an alternative period and cohort life expectancy measures using a Bayesian Model Ensemble of heterogeneous stochastic mortality models Citation: Ayuso, Mercedes, Jorge M. comprised of parametric models, principal component methods, and smoothing approaches.