From Marital Entitlements to Individual Risks: Vertical Solidarity and the Future of Survivors’ Pensions in Beveridgean Systems

Survivors’ pensions have long served as a central pillar of social protection in Beveridgean pension systems, offering intrafamilial insurance against the economic consequences of widowhood. Yet demographic ageing, evolving family structures, and gendered labour‑market patterns increasingly call into question the appropriateness and sustainability of marital-status‑based entitlements. Drawing on recent European jurisprudence and ongoing reform debates in Switzerland, Finland, Germany, and Japan, the project examines how the abolition or redesign of survivors’ pensions would affect vertical solidarity in a Beveridgean first‑pillar pension system. Using the Swiss Old‑Age and Survivors’ Insurance (OASI) as an illustrative case, the analysis explores how interpersonal redistribution, intrafamilial solidarity, and spousal equalisation mechanisms jointly shape pension outcomes across marital statuses and along the pension‑income distribution. The study employs MIDAS‑CH, a dynamic microsimulation model calibrated to Swiss SILC data, to generate long‑term counterfactual life‑course trajectories under shifting gender labour‑market behaviours. This enables an assessment of how redistribution embedded in the Swiss first pillar—minimum and maximum pensions, care credits, splitting rules, and survivor benefits—operates in a context where men’s and women’s participation, hours, and wages converge. As family structures diversify and dual-earner households become the norm, traditional justifications for marital entitlements weaken, suggesting that solidarity mechanisms may need to shift from status-based to individualised forms. To identify the redistribution channels at work, the project applies a Recentered Influence Function (RIF) decomposition, which separates differences in characteristics (earnings histories, contribution years, care credits) from differences in coefficients, interpreted as the redistributive valuation embedded in the benefit formula. This distinction allows a distribution‑sensitive quantification of vertical solidarity and an assessment of how strongly various institutional components compensate gendered labour‑market inequalities. The RIF approach provides insight into nonlinear redistribution at the bottom, middle, and top of the pension distribution—precisely where floors, ceilings, credit valuation, and splitting rules bite. Simulation results show that survivors’ benefits play a meaningful but declining role in equalising outcomes, particularly as women accumulate stronger contributory records. Removing survivor pensions lowers intrafamilial solidarity but increases the relative importance of interpersonal redistribution, especially for low‑income individuals. When labour‑market participation, work intensity, and wages between men and women are equalised, women’s pensions rise markedly, while men’s decline modestly. Consequently, the gender pension gap narrows substantially through improved earnings capacity rather than through marital entitlements. In scenarios of full labour‑market convergence, marital-status‑based mechanisms—splitting, capping, and survivors’ benefits—become less central, while individualised solidarity instruments such as minimum pensions and care credits remain decisive. These findings highlight a fundamental shift in the organisation of solidarity within Beveridgean pension systems. As gender labour‑market trajectories converge and family forms diversify, the rationale for marital entitlements weakens, and the effectiveness of solidarity increasingly depends on individualised, needs‑based instruments rather than derived rights. Vertical solidarity remains essential for cushioning fragmented careers and low earnings, but its incidence evolves as women’s labour‑market attachment strengthens. In this environment, survivor protection can be better targeted through time‑limited or earnings‑tested supplements, while care credits and progressive benefit formulas remain central to mitigating gendere