Pension Fund Participation and Contribution in Italy: An Intra-Couple Decision?

This thesis examines pension fund participation and contribution in Italy from an intra-couple perspective. It first reconstructs the institutional and fiscal framework of the Italian supplementary pension system and reviews individual and household economics research on pension choices. Two empirical contributions based on the Survey on Household Income and Wealth (SHIW) follow. The first aims to test which household-economics paradigm – unitary, cooperative (with or without divorce risk), or non-cooperative – best explains participation in and contributions to second- and third-pillar plans, using data on 8,847 employee couples and contrasting crowding-in with crowding-out. It finds strong crowding-in, with contributions favoring the financially weaker spouse, consistent with divorce-risk or financial-autonomy motives. The second examines the couples’ decisions to transfer severance pay (TFR) to the second pillar under automatic enrollment. Using the specialization framework of Becker (1973), it shows that participation choices are strongly correlated between partners in a couple, and that the financial decision-maker exerts a stronger influence on the partner than vice versa. The influence of the decision-maker is even greater when it is the female spouse. Overall, the findings reject an individual view of pension choices in favor of a couple-based one.