Labour market and old-age transfers: measuring the cohort effects of the pension reforms in Poland using APC approach

Pawel A. Strzelecki, Warsaw School of Economics
Agnieszka Chlon-Dominczak, Warsaw School of Economics
Wojciech Latkowski, Warsaw School of Economics

In this paper we use age-period-cohort decomposition (APC) to measure the potential impact of pension reforms in Poland on the sources of income and labour force participation and retirement of individuals. Since 2009 Poland introduced measures that aim at increasing retirement age and prolong working lives. The first reform was introduced in 2009 and left the access to early pensions only to very restricted occupations. The second reform was a gradual increase of the retirement age since 2013. In our analysis we used the Deaton’s (1999) decomposition and Polish Labour Force survey, EU Survey on Income and Living Conditions and Socal Security data which allow us to calculate labour force participation rates, pension recipiency rates and labour income by single-age groups. The analysis suggests that the jumps in the labour force participation rates both for women and men were observed in the cohorts influenced by the reform of early pensions.