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Who Participates in Defined Contribution Pension Systems When Informality is High?: Evidence from 20 Years of Administrative Records from the Dominican Republic

Abstract
This note is part of a collaboration between the World Bank’s development research group (DECRG) and development impact group (DIME) and the Dominican Pension Superintendency (SIPEN), the autonomous agency responsible for supervising the private pension system. The main goal of this collaboration is to leverage the rich administrative data managed by SIPEN to provide insight on the performance of the pension system for policymakers and the public and conduct academic research that can guide pension policy in the DR and beyond. In particular, the administrative records of pension contributions constitute a complete dataset of matched employer-employee data, providing a comprehensive view of formal labor market dynamics and complete formal work history for individuals. The World Bank and SIPEN teams collaborated to extract a representative data sample suitable for data analysis and policy research, described in the data section below. While this study centers on the examination of contribution density patterns disaggregated by gender and birth cohorts, Appella and Zunino (2025) concurrently conducted a complementary analysis using the same dataset, with their research focusing specifically on estimating the determinants of contribution transitions.
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Joubert, Clement; Scot, Thiago; Maríñez, Isaac Rafael; Regalado, Pietter José; Flores, Tatiana; Rodriguez, Nicolas Garces. 2025. Who Participates in Defined Contribution Pension Systems When Informality is High?: Evidence from 20 Years of Administrative Records from the Dominican Republic. Social Protection Discussion Paper; No.2519, February 2025. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/43528 License: CC BY-NC 3.0 IGO.
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