Saving for retirement through the public pension system: Evidence from the self-employed in Spain

Using the fact that the Spanish self-employed voluntarily choose their contributions to Social Security, I study the effect of financial incentives on public pension savings for self-employed workers in Spain. For this, I implement a difference-in-differences approach exploiting the change in public pension saving incentives induced by the 1997 pension reform. I find that the Spanish self-employed significantly respond to the financial incentives for public pension savings. However, the estimated response could be considered modest relative to the magnitude of the return to contributions provided by pension formulas in Spain. I provide evidence suggesting that the lack of salience of the return to contributions could be one of the main drivers of such a modest response, highlighting the importance of information and salience on the responsiveness of self-employed workers to saving incentives.