OECD pension reform: The role of demographic trends and the business cycle

Using a new real-time dataset from Beetsma et al. (2020) containing all pension reform measures in 23 OECD countries between 1970 and 2017, the authors demonstrate that, in contrast to what one might a priori expect, the timing of pension reform measures coincides with business cycle shocks and not with current or projected demographic shocks.