Policy Expectations and Cross-domain Feedback: A Large-scale Survey on Delayed Retirement Policies and Fertility Plan

• In Event: Policymaking in China

Abstract

The world is currently facing a crisis of low fertility rates, while traditional policy instruments often fail to promote intended pro-natalist outcomes. In China, birth rates have reached record lows despite the transition to the three-child policy and expanded subsidies. One underexplored source of this tension is delayed retirement policy. Work and reproduction are fundamental parts of the life cycle, meaning retirement and fertility are inherently linked. In addition, policy expectations have been widely studied in macro-financial research, yet rarely examined in policy process study; nevertheless, their strong behavioural and psychological feedback effects cannot be overlooked. 

Policy feedback theory explains how existing policies shape citizen attitudes. Most research focuses on within-domain effects, leaving cross-domain feedback unexplored, and the role of policy expectations is still unknown. Building on cross-domain policy feedback, we examine how the design of retirement policy reaches into family formation, and we propose the expectation effect as the mechanism at work. Policy expectation is the set of expected thoughts a citizen holds about the policy design, covering policy goals, tools and intensity of parameters. Citizens' expectations towards a policy determine whether it is perceived as a predictable, acceptable adjustment or an insufferable intrusive disruption. When the statutory retirement age is higher than what a citizen anticipates, it will generate a negative psychological shock. This gap exceeds psychological resources individuals have prepared for life planning and induces a sense of being compelled to perform state-mandated tasks, which may crowd out positive orientations toward social and family responsibilities.

So, we propose the research question: Do expectations of delayed retirement policies exert a cross-domain feedback effect on fertility plans? We hypothesize that the policy expectation gap reduces the probability of positive fertility plans. Moreover, subjective lifespan is a negative moderator. A shorter perceived lifespan intensifies the negative impact of the expectation gap because people perceive a more compressed window for balancing professional obligations and family formation. 

Methodologically, we implemented a large-scale survey to collect 7,625 valid responses after rigorous quality control—including attention checks, response time filtering, and consistency audits—utilizing the large sample to ensure the consistency and asymptotic efficiency of our estimators while minimizing potential bias. We measure fertility plans to capture more concrete fertility decision-making and policy expectation gap is calculated as the numerical difference between the statutory retirement age and each participant’s subjective expected retirement age. We also control for demographic and health-related variables to mitigate omitted variable bias, and conduct empirical analyses using logit and moderating effect models.

We find that a larger policy expectation gap is associated with a lower probability of planning a child. The association is concentrated where the prescribed age exceeds the expected one and strengthens as the gap widens, and it is amplified by policy proximity, since it is strongest among the citizens the reform binds most directly and who know it. These findings extend policy feedback theory across domains, identify expectation effects, and imply that anticipatory policy design has to engage citizens' policy expectation.

Authors

• Jasper Pinquan Jiang, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST)
  Presenting Author

• Xuan ZHANG, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST)
  Non-Presenting Co-Author