WHY ARE OLDER PENSIONERS POORER

We show that older male pensioners have substantially lower incomes th an younger pensioners. There are a number of possible reasons for this including under-indexation of private pensions and the running down o f income producing assets. In fact we find that cohort differences mor e than account for the lower incomes of older pensioners in the sense that the mean income of order pensioners is actually higher than the m ean income of the same cohort of pensioners when they were younger. We explore a number of possible reasons for this and conclude that it;is driven by differential mortality between richer and poorer pensioners . We show how this manifests itself in a long time series of cross-sec tional datasets.