This dissertation presents three essays on retirement and savings behaviour. It relies on secondary data from British national surveys to empirically address how workers prepare and adapt to the economic circumstances of later life. Chapter 1 analyses the effectiveness of providing workers with the opportunity to join workplace pension schemes to stimulate pension savings. It estimates the potential opt-in rate among employees who haven’t been offered a pension plan by an employer, had they been offered the opportunity to join a scheme. Governmental policies enforcing pension plan provision at every workplace could generate a major impact on aggregate participation rates. This potential success does not seem to be conditional on the existence of mechanisms imposed by law concerning the way workers are enrolled. Chapter 2 examines the effect of workplace pension schemes provision and participation on other individual financial savings, such as personal pension plans and financial assets. It exploits the variability in workplace pension scheme provision and membership induced by the employer’s payroll size as an identification strategy. No evidence is found that providing employees with access to workplace pension schemes would make them less likely to save through non-pension financial instruments. These results support the enforcement of the universal provision of workplace pension schemes as a national policy to improve financial preparation for retirement. Chapter 3 builds on the literature of the economic role of home production of goods and services at retirement. The literature usually restricts the explanation of retirees’ heterogeneous attitudes towards home production to gender differences or social norms related to couples’ division of labour. The present study provides novel evidence that non-cognitive skills in the form of personality traits explain the heterogeneous reallocation of time and consumption that occurs during a transition from the labour market to retirement.

A central theme in the comparative political economy of the welfare state is the complementaries between political institutions, social policy, and labour markets. Yet little has been written to uncover this political-economic nexus in China, the world’s second largest economy. This thesis partly addresses this gap by studying the country’s public pension arrangement, the most expensive component of the Chinese welfare state. It reveals the working of the political-economic nexus in contemporary China by showing how it leads to two puzzling characteristics of the Chinese pension system, namely the rapid expansion in the absence of electoral pressures and the persistent regional fragmentation despite an authoritarian central government. It argues that the decentralised authoritarianism, in which China’s authoritarian central state delegates to regional governments and motivates them to achieve its developmental goals, drives municipal authorities to compete with each other in generating economic growth. In the inter-municipal economic competition, local leaders adopt an expansionary yet localising pension policy. This facilitates the formation of specific industrial skills, which are productive for particular local industries, and the retention of skilled industrial workers. All of this is important to local economic development in a context of industrial upgrading and labour market tightening. It is argued this is the political-economic logic of China’s pension system.