Pensions reforms, workforce ageing and firm-provided welfare
This paper investigates the impact of an exogenous increase in the legal retirement age on the firms’
propensity to provide welfare services voluntarily to their employees. To this purpose we exploit a
unique information derived from the Rilevazione su Imprese e Lavoro (RIL), a survey conducted in
2015 on a large and representative sample of Italian firms. Applying different regression models we
show that firms which were forced to give up previously planned hirings because of the Law
201/2011 (the so-called “Fornero pension reform”), increased the probability of providing welfare
services at workplace. By referring to the sociological, human resource management and economic
literature we then argue that a sudden increase in the legal retirement age may motivate the
employers to establish welfare schemes as a way to cope with an ageing workforce. Our findings
also hold when propensity score matching methods are used in order to control for sample selection
issues.