"No Country for Old Men"

This paper examines how homeownership status affects the preferences of old voters and the provision of public goods such as pension benefits. Focusing on Korea, which has seen an increased reliance on public pension systems like other industrial countries, I explore why more than half the senior citizens are in poverty, the highest among advanced industrial countries, and why a monthly pension remains at a shallow level. It is puzzling to see this phenomenon in a country with a rapidly aging population, having more old voters than the young. Why is the well-being of elderly citizens who takes up more than a majority not reflected in the welfare policy? While most of the existing research assumes homeowners’ preferences for redistributive policies to be the same, I contend that what matters is not only homeownership but also the value of houses as it determines whether those owning homes can rely on reverse-mortgages, a type of loan available for older property owners to secure their homes, which is increasingly used as an alternate type of pension in Korea. I argue that those with their own homes will not necessarily support more welfare programs, splitting policy preferences among elderly citizens. I argue and show that individuals’ support for the government’s expansion of pension benefits are determined by whether they are eligible for reverse-mortgages, using the data from the Korean Longitudinal Study of Aging survey.