News

08 Jul 19 | News

A multi-disciplinary effort for evaluating gender pension gaps in several European countries

Luxembourg stakeholders will gather at LISER to begin a series of exchanges

LISER researcher, Philippe Liégeois, is participating in the multi-disciplinary EU-funded project MIGAPE (“MInd the GAp in PEnsions”) gathering partners from Belgium, Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, Portugal and Slovenia to simulate and communicate the projections of the gender pension gaps in various member states and assess the linkages with previous labour market behaviour.

The Gender Pension Gap (GPG) refers to the fact that women generally receive a lower pension than men. GPGs are of course the result of the different labour market behaviour of women compared to men, as in most countries the pension an individual receives at retirement is in a direct or indirect way a function of the past career and earnings. However, the relation between the earnings gap and differences in participation rates, on the one hand, and GPGs later in life, is far from linear and depends on many mediating aspects, including state transfers and especially the “compensating” or redistributive elements embedded in the state (first-tier) pension systems of all countries.

The objectives of this project can be grouped along three related axes:

  1. To use standard simulation techniques, provide information on the consequences of labour market decisions in the various stages of life on the future pension benefit of women.
  2. To use dynamic microsimulation techniques to estimate the impact of various factors on future GPGs for the population as a whole.
  3. To assess psychological factors that may affect (women’s) employment decisions through an on-line survey and some laboratory experimentation.

In this project, LISER will join forces with CEPS (general coordinator, Belgium), the Federal Planning Bureau (scientific coordinator, Belgium), the Center for Social and Cultural Psychology, KU Leuven (Belgium), the University of Liechtenstein (Liechtenstein), IER (Slovenia) and ICS/University of Lisbon (Portugal).

Luxembourg stakeholders will gather at LISER to begin a series of exchanges on September 17th . A complementary initial session was organised in Brussels in June with European-wide interested parties.

This project is funded by the European Union's Rights, Equality and Citizenship Programme (Grant Agreement number: 820798 — MIGAPE — REC-AG-2017/REC-RGEN-PENS-AG-2017)

Practical info http://www.migape.eu/

Contact person at LISER: Dr. Philippe Liégeois (Philippe.Liegeois@liser.lu)