October 09, 2016 | News | News

MPIDR researcher Angelo Lorenti is awarded the Valeria Solesin prize

On October 9, 2016, MPIDR researcher Angelo Lorenti was awarded the “Valeria Solesin” prize for the best thesis in demography by the Italian Society of Statistics (Società Italiana di Statistica). The prize is endowed with a sum of 1,000 euros. Awarded for the first time this year, the prize is given in memory of the young demographer Valeria Solesin, who died in the terrorist attack at the Bataclan nightclub in Paris in November 2015.

In his thesis, Angelo Lorenti investigated for European countries the individual determinants of the likelihood of engaging in paid work after retirement. The first aim of Lorenti’s research was to provide insight into the individual characteristics associated with post-retirement employment, with a particular focus on socioeconomic status. The second aim of his thesis was to evaluate the impact of institutional arrangements on the likelihood of being employed after retirement, and to assess to what extent country-specific factors affect post-retirement employment patterns.

In line with the previous literature, Angelo Lorenti found that the main factors that determine the differences in the post-retirement employment rates of countries are the institutional arrangements in each country. Moreover, he found that the decision about whether to work after entering retirement is strongly associated with an individual’s socioeconomic status. Specifically, his analysis showed that individuals with larger pensions are more likely than individuals with smaller pensions to engage in paid work after retirement. A possible explanation for this gap is that retirees with larger pensions often want to continue to work because they still have the social status they attained over the course of their career, whereas retirees with smaller pensions are more likely to work out of economic necessity.