| 邹红,刘丽娇,李胡建,肖翰.有钱还需有闲？企业职工养老金政策的消费扩容效应研究[J].数量经济技术经济研究,2026,(6):57-80 | | 有钱还需有闲？企业职工养老金政策的消费扩容效应研究 | | More Money, But No Time? A Study of the Consumption Expansion Effect of the Enterprise Employee Pension Policy | | | | DOI： | | 中文关键词: 消费扩容 企业职工养老金政策 预防性储蓄 时间配置 | | 英文关键词: Consumption Expansion Enterprise Employee Pension Policy Precautionary Savings Time Allocation | | 基金项目: | | | 中文摘要: | | 完善养老金制度是激活银发消费潜能的重要抓手。本文以企业职工养老金连续上调政策作为准自然实验，基于中国健康与养老追踪调查和家庭日度电子扫码数据，采用强度双重差分法识别了企业职工养老金政策对家庭消费的扩容效应。研究发现，养老金政策显著提升了家庭人均消费支出，增长主要体现在食品、医疗保健及与闲暇互补的服务消费上，且时间约束较弱的家庭消费转化效率更高。机制分析表明，养老金政策主要通过缓解收入与时间两类约束来提升消费转化效率。一方面，政策通过增加持久性收入，降低家庭收入风险并改善老年人健康状况，缓解了预防性储蓄动机；另一方面，政策显著降低了代际同住概率，释放了老年人的闲暇时间，使其更有条件将支付能力转化为时间密集型消费。基于此，本文提出应当多措并举完善社会保障和家庭支持配套政策，实现“有钱”与“有闲”的有效协同，以老年消费扩容升级牵引银发经济发展。本文的研究发现为扩容老年消费、激发银发经济活力及完善老龄化社会治理提供了参考依据。 | | 英文摘要: | | Domestic demand is the primary engine and a crucial stabilizer of economic growth. Amidst accelerating aging and a fading demographic dividend, the effective activation of the silver economy’s consumption potential has become a key objective to reshape China’s domestic demand pattern. Enterprise employee pensions are the primary source of income for the elderly in China, and their continuous upward adjustment not only plays a basic security role, but is also endowed with new strategic connotations of stabilizing expectations and promoting consumption. However, current existing research on social security and household consumption, although extensive, mainly focused on alleviating income constraints, generally ignoring the complementary role of time factors in the consumption realization process. In reality, China’s elderly population faces severe “dual resource constraints”: on the one hand, they need to save, to guard against future risks for themselves and their descendants; on the other hand, they undertake heavy intergenerational care and domestic labor, severely reducing their leisure time, which could have been used for consumption. This structural contradiction of “having money but no time” may severely restrict the consumption release of the elderly in high-quality service areas such as tourism and cultural entertainment. On this basis, this study aims to answer the following core questions: Does the continuous upward adjustment of the enterprise employee pension effectively promote the expansion of household consumption? Is there a significant difference in this expansion effect among elderly groups facing different time constraint characteristics, and what are the underlying internal mechanisms?
To answer these questions, this study takes the continuous upward adjustment of the enterprise employee pension as a quasi-natural experiment. Based on the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS) and daily household electronic scanner data, we employ an intensity difference-in-differences method to identify for the first time the consumption expansion effect of this policy. The results show that the pension policy significantly increases per capita household consumption expenditure, especially in relation to food, healthcare, and leisure-complementary service consumption. The heterogeneity analysis shows that households with weaker time constraints have higher consumption conversion efficiency. Combining micro-survey and high-frequency daily data, the mechanism analysis found that the pension policy enhances consumption conversion efficiency mainly by alleviating two types of constraints, namely income and time. On the one hand, by increasing permanent income, reducing household income risk, and improving the health status of the elderly, this policy effectively alleviates precautionary savings motives. On the other hand, the increase in pension benefits significantly reduces the probability of intergenerational co-residence, releasing the leisure time of the elderly and making it easier for them to convert purchasing power into time-intensive service consumption and high-frequency offline shopping.
The contributions of this study to existing literature are reflected in three aspects. First, it systematically evaluates the marginal effect of the continuous upward adjustment of the enterprise basic pension policy on household consumption. Unlike previous research, based on one-time institutional changes, this study manually collects provincial pension adjustment plans to construct a city-level policy intensity index, thus providing more precise empirical evidence for identifying the intensive marginal effect of social security benefit adjustments. Second, it deepens the understanding of the mechanisms through which intra-household resource allocation improvements drive consumption expansion. By isolating the time effect in addition to the traditional income effect, this study reveals that the pension policy not only alleviates the precautionary savings motive, but also releases consumption potential by improving time availability for the elderly, thereby supplementing relevant theories. Third, it reveals the heterogeneous role of time constraint intensity on the consumption expansion effect of pensions. By utilizing daily electronic scanner data to finely delineate food purchase frequencies and channel choices, this study expands the research perspectives on how social security affects consumption preferences at the micro level, based on differences in intra-household time allocation. Based on these findings, this study suggests adopting several measures to improve social security and family support policies—such as inclusive childcare and domestic services—to effectively reduce the caregiving burden of the elderly. Achieving an effective synergy between “having money” and “having leisure” will ultimately foster the high-quality development of the silver industry through the expansion and upgrading of elderly consumption. | | 查看全文 相关附件： 下载数据代码附录 |
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