Academic Announcement | Energy Economics Seminar [General 127] How Do Households Respond to Pension Increases? Evidence from Monthly Pane

Activity Arrangement:

13:00-14:00 Academic report

14:00-14:30 Exchange of participants

Speaker: Huang Wei, National University of Singapore

Time: Tuesday, December 1, 2020, 13:00-14:30

Location: Zoom (Conference ID: 831 2255 6291;Password: 951130)

Conference link: https://hu-berlin.zoom.us/j/83122556291?

pwd=MkVIOFVMdDNwUXhnUllsSzZVMVZsUT09

Summary of report:

Exploring the prefectural policies that permanently and temporarily increase pension levels in urban China, we use the monthly panel data from Urban Household Survey (UHS) to examine the household responses in an event study setting. For each pension increase, the reform on average increases per capita permanent and transitory pension incomes by 100 yuan and 50 yuan among the eligible households, respectively. The consumption per capita increases by 90 yuan permanently, yielding an estimate of marginal propensity to consume (MPC) being 0.9 for permanent income. The estimated MPC is much larger among the households with lower income. By contrast, in the estimating window period, we find no significant impacts on other household incomes, including wage, property, business or transfers, or other outcomes such as household size, structure, and individual labor supply. Among the non-eligible households, we find no significant effects on all the above outcomes.

Brief introduction of the author:

Dr HUANG Wei is the President’s Assistant Professor in the Department of Real Estate and Department of Strategy and Policy at National University of Singapore. Prior to joining NUS, Dr Huang was a Post-doctoral Fellow in Aging and Health Economics at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). Dr Huang received his PhD in economics from Harvard University in 2016. He received an M.A in economics from National School of Development at Peking University in 2011, and a B.A. in physics from School of Physics at Peking University in 2008.

His research fields are public economics, labor economics, and health economics. He is interested in the topics such as health, education, ethnicity, and China. His research work has been published in journals such asReview of Economic and Statistics,Journal of Labor Economics,American Economic Journal:Applied Economics,Nature,Journal of Economic Perspectives, etc. He is an editor forEconomics of Transition.

The Energy Economics Seminar is regularly launched by the Department of Energy Economics, School of Applied Economics, Renmin University of China, with the aim of providing a platform for communication among scholars studying Energy economy issues in China.

Contact: Ying Zheng(yingzheng@ruc.edu.cn); Yi Han (yihanecon@ruc.edu.cn)