Old-Age Social Insurance and Household Consumption: Evidence from China

ABSTRACT

Improving social welfare and stimulating consumption are two important issues in promoting economic growth. Based on the panel data of China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study 2011 and 2013, this article precisely calculated the Social Security Wealth of employees and residents. The fixed-effect model and quantile regression method were employed. Besides, this study used the interaction of year dummy and age dummy as an instrumental variable. The results from this study indicate that Social Security Wealth can promote the total household consumption as well as improve the household consumption structure. However, the impact varies in both employees and residents’ groups.

KEY WORDS:

• employees and residents
• household consumption
• social security wealth

Notes

^1. Residents are people who are covered by urban residents’ old-age social insurance and new rural residents’ old-age social insurance.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the key projects of the National Social Science Fund of China [12&ZD050].