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Compute Ratio of Last Salary to First Pension for Retired Workers

compute_pension_ratio.Rd

For each individual who has retired, computes the ratio of their first pension payment to their last active salary.

Usage

compute_pension_ratio(
  personnel_dt,
  contract_dt,
  salary_col,
  personnel_id_col = "personnel_id",
  status_col = "employment_status",
  date_col = "ref_date",
  pensioner_value = "pensioner",
  keep_vars = NULL
)

Arguments

personnel_dt

A data.table (or tibble/data.frame) containing at minimum the columns named in `id_col`, `status_col`, and `date_col`.

contract_dt

A data.table (or tibble/data.frame) containing at minimum the columns named in `id_col`, `date_col`, and `salary_col`.

salary_col

A single string naming the compensation column to use, e.g. `"gross_salary_def"` (default), `"base_salary_lcu"`, etc.

personnel_id_col

A single string naming the personnel identifier column. Defaults to `"personnel_id"`.

status_col

A single string naming the employment status column inside `personnel_dt`. Defaults to `"employment_status"`.

date_col

A single string naming the snapshot/reference date column. Defaults to `"ref_date"`.

pensioner_value

A single string giving the value of `status_col` that identifies a pensioner record. Defaults to `"pensioner"`.

keep_vars

A character vector of additional contract-level columns to attach via `govhr::add_contract_to_event()`. Defaults to NULL

Value

A data.table with one row per retiring individual containing the `id_col` identifier, `ref_date_active` (last active date), `last_salary`, `ref_date_pension` (first pension date), `first_pension`, and `replacement_rate`.

Details

The replacement rate is a standard diagnostic in public sector pension and workforce analysis, and it matters here for a few distinct reasons:

  • Fiscal sustainability: Aggregated across occupation or paygrade, replacement rates feed directly into pension liability projections.

  • Retirement incentive / take-up behavior: Low replacement rates help explain deferred retirement, relevant to calibrating ANNUAL_TAKE_UP rather than assuming 100% take-up at eligibility.

  • Equity diagnostics: Comparing rates across paygrade, occupation, or establishment can surface structural inequities in how the pension formula interacts with career trajectories.

  • Policy reform simulation: Because the function is column-name agnostic, it can be re-run under counterfactual salary or pension formulas or against differently structured client datasets without code changes.