Tax relief on supplementary pensions represents one of the pillars of the so-called voluntary welfare (Barr, 1992). The economic analysis of this policy has centered on its effect on national savings, as a positive by-product of the existence of private pension plans which further increases their attractiveness. The evidence on the issue is still inconclusive, with most of the studies focusing on the United States and failing to reach consensus on its effectiveness.
Unfortunately, information on the costs of the tax incentives promoting these benefits is remarkably limited. There is only one study on the Spanish case, Ayuso et al. 2007), which examines the effects of the introduction of tax benefits on consumption in the late 1980s. Both descriptive and multivariate analysis of the database was performed using the five imputations included with the survey.
4 The data are available free of charge on the Bank of Spain website, together with the codebooks and questionnaires translated into English. Therefore, we estimate the equations presented above using both a binary indicator of pension plan participation and the annual level of contributions as key variables for determining the effect of pension plan participation on savings.
RESULTS
Therefore, identification of the causal effect of pension contributions is achieved provided that the endogeneity of this variable is associated with time-varying observable characteristics and time-constant unobservable factors. One should keep in mind that although we control for a wide range of observable characteristics, unobserved time-varying variables that are not independent of the dependent variable and contributions may lead to inconsistent estimators. 11 The results of the econometric analysis are displayed in Table 2.5 First, it shows that the null hypothesis that claims that contribution to voluntary pensions does not reduce consumption cannot be rejected in any of the proposed specifications, either by a binary variable for contributors to use or a continuous variable for contribution amounts.
To check the robustness of the results, we repeat the analysis excluding non-durable goods from our consumption variable and the results remain. Second, we test whether being a contributor to a pension plan or the amount contributed is associated with lower non-retirement wealth. Based on the results obtained in this second test, we can reject the hypothesis of zero substitutability when using the binary indicator of being part of a pension plan, while none of the estimated coefficients is statistically different from zero in the case of contributions .
Fixed-effects estimate of the impact of contributions to private pension schemes on consumption and non-pension savings. 13 a significant role in the survey (an issue which, as mentioned in section 3, is addressed by means of multiple imputation), particularly with regard to savings: while around 45% of households surveyed had an imputed component of household savings in 2005, this proportion was less than 5% in consumption.
CONCLUSIONS
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