Pensions, houses and fertility in the new normal: What has changed since the financial crisis?

Housing, pensions and fertility are usually treated separately or at most as pairs. Ministries typically have policy responsibility for one issue area; academics typically link two issue areas. Yet these three issues form an indivisible policy triangle. Put simply, the way that housing purchases are financed strongly influences the nature of the pension system; the long term stability of the pension system depends strongly on the level of fertility; the overall level of fertility depends strongly on the age at which couples form independent households and thus enter the market for housing. This policy triangle overlaps at two points with a second triangle that forms the usual domain of the ‘babies and bosses’ policy discourse: employment access, fertility, and benefits (including pensions). This paper investigates the degree to which these triangles constituted specific and discernible clusters of ‘welfare regimes’ before the crisis in order to assess how they may change after the crisis.