5-1 - Comment

Summary

As a participant in the project that led to this chapter, I am in a somewhat awkward position. If I deliver an acidic account of the shortcomings, I will shoot myself in the foot. If I praise the paper, nobody will believe my self-serving comments. As one says in German, our respected editor elected the goat to be the gardener. What should I do other than to shoot and to praise anyway?

Starting with the praise, this international comparison project is successful for at least three reasons. First, Gruber and Wise enforced a very strict framework. Every country did the same calculations, using similar sources. A tight template aimed to ensure strict comparability across countries. The project was not the first international comparison of retirement systems; however, many failed exactly because results were not as comparable as in this project.

Second, the project was able to exploit meaningful international variation. Retirement incentives are astoundingly different across countries that have otherwise fairly similar economic and social backgrounds. The chapter uses these differences to identify behavior, thereby largely avoiding the danger of relating behavioral differences only to differences in amorphous “culture”.

Finally, all eleven papers on which the Gruber and Wise chapter is based have a single and stark message: Retirement incentives matter, and they matter systematically across the eleven countries in the project. This message serves as an organizing principle of the Gruber-Wise summary, making it an effective “issues brief” on the question of how workers respond to retirement incentives.