Automatic Enrolment and Household Saving-Instrument Portfolios: Evidence from Türkiye’s 2017 OKS Reform

Emre Özyerden, Thomas Post and N. Semih Öz

Working paper, September 2026

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Abstract

Automatic enrolment reliably raises participation in retirement plans. Whether it raises household saving is a separate question, and plan-level data cannot answer it, because they observe one account rather than the household’s portfolio. We study Türkiye’s 2017 automatic-enrolment reform, which set eligibility by a worker’s age at an employer-specific inclusion date, using the Household Budget Survey. The survey records the instruments through which a household saves, up to four, from bank deposits and securities to gold, foreign exchange, real estate and investment in a household’s own business. We reconstruct legal eligibility from reported age and job tenure and compare eligible-type with ineligible-type households within the public sector over 2015–2019. Eligibility raises reported use of the pension-linked instrument by 33.9 percentage points. Non-pension participation falls by 0.5 points, but the confidence interval spans the ±5-point equivalence margin, so economically meaningful displacement cannot be ruled out. Overall saving participation rises by 12.2 points and portfolio breadth by 0.32 instruments, almost entirely through the pension-linked instrument itself. The reform thus changed which saving instruments households report. Consumption did not detectably fall, but the contributions involved, under 1% of household consumption on average, are too small for the survey to show how they were financed.

JEL codes: D14, G51, H55, J26

Keywords: automatic enrolment; pension saving; household portfolios; crowd-out; Türkiye

Data and code

The Household Budget Survey microdata are available from TÜİK under its microdata access terms; code to reproduce all results is available from the authors.

Cite as

Özyerden, E., Post, T., & Öz, N. S. (2026). Automatic Enrolment and Household Saving-Instrument Portfolios: Evidence from Türkiye’s 2017 OKS Reform. Working paper, September 2026. https://emreozyerden.com/research/automatic-enrolment/

BibTeX

@unpublished{ozyerden2026automatic,
  author = {Özyerden, Emre and Post, Thomas and Öz, N. Semih},
  title  = {{Automatic Enrolment and Household Saving-Instrument Portfolios: Evidence from Türkiye's 2017 OKS Reform}},
  year   = {2026},
  note   = {Working paper, September 2026},
  url    = {https://emreozyerden.com/research/automatic-enrolment/}
}

Version history

• September 2026 — first version