(May 2026) A new study of Italy's short-lived Quota 100 pension reform reveals that workers excluded from early retirement on arbitrary grounds suffered significant mental health impacts, and that the party responsible paid for it at the ballot box. 

What was Quota 100? 

In January 2019, Italy's coalition government introduced a temporary early retirement scheme called Quota 100. Workers could retire early if they met two conditions simultaneously: they had to be at least 62 years old, and they had to have accumulated at least 38 years of pension contributions. This was far earlier than the standard retirement age of 67 put in place by the largely unpopular 2011 Fornero Act. 

The hope was that allowing older workers to retire early would free up positions for young people struggling to enter the job market. The scheme ran for three years and was then abolished. Around 380,000 workers retired under it.  But the design of the reform created an arbitrary division: workers born after 1960 were categorically excluded, regardless of how many years they had paid into the system. It is worth noting that male workers represented roughly 70% of the early retirees – probably because it is harder for women who have had children to meet the 38-year contribution requirement.  

How researchers in Italy studied Quota 100’s excluded workers 

Researchers Raffaele Fiorentino and Simona Mandile, from the Vergata University of Rome and the  University of Bergamo respectively, used data from Waves 5 to 9 (so years 2013 to 2021) of the Survey of Health, Ageing, Retirement in Europe, which tracks the health and economic circumstances of people aged 50 and over across Europe at two-year intervals. 

Because SHARE had been following Italian workers since 2013 – well before the reform – the researchers could observe the same individuals both before and after Quota 100 came into force, comparing those just below the age threshold to those just above it. 

This before-and-after design allowed them to isolate the reform's effects from other things that might have been changing in workers' lives at the same time.  

Mental health was measured using a 14-component index drawing on SHARE's detailed psychological battery, covering symptoms including sadness, sleep disturbance, loss of interest, irritability, fatigue, difficulty concentrating, and use of anxiolytics or antidepressants. The researchers analysed data for men only, because the statutory retirement age for men before the reform had been stable at 67, whereas for women it had increased over time and unevenly depending on sector and birth cohort.  

They combined this with complementary data from the European Social Survey and Italian electoral records to study what happened to the men who narrowly missed out. 

The key finding: it's about fairness, not workload 

The excluded workers simply carried on working as before. They did not become unemployed or sick at higher rates. But their mental health deteriorated significantly, which is a substantial effect for a policy that, on paper, left their material circumstances unchanged. 

The most striking result in the study is what happened when the researchers split the excluded workers into two groups: those who had met the contribution threshold but failed on age, and those who had not accumulated enough contribution years either. 

Only the first group showed mental health deterioration. Workers who could reasonably say "I didn't qualify anyway" were psychologically unaffected. The harm was specific to those who had paid their dues, sometimes for four decades, and were then told a birth year ruled them out. 

The dominant symptoms were guilt, self-blame and irritability. The effects were strongest among blue-collar workers, and amplified among those with fewer children or weaker family networks. White-collar workers showed no comparable effects. 

Beyond SHARE: Trust in institutions and politicians 

To examine whether the reform affected how excluded workers viewed political institutions, the researchers turned to wave 9 of the European Social Survey, restricted to Italian respondents. Comparing workers born just before and just after the 1960 cutoff, who were otherwise very similar, they found that workers just below the threshold reported significantly lower trust in parliament, political parties and politicians. Trust in the legal system, which played no role in the reform, was unaffected. 

A third dataset, Italian national and European Parliament electoral results at the municipal level across six elections between 2013 and 2024, allowed the researchers to test whether this resentment translated into voting behaviour. The League (Lega), the political party led at the time by Matteo Salvini and who had most publicly championed Quota 100, lost vote share in municipalities with higher concentrations of excluded workers. Those losses exceeded the gains in areas with more beneficiaries, making the reform a net electoral liability for its principal architect. 

What were the consequences of the Quota 100 reform? 

Post-mortem studies found that for every three workers who retired under Quota 100, only about one new young worker was hired. The programme also cost billions of euros, which significantly increased Italy’s public debt, while causing immediate staffing shortages in critical public sectors, particularly in healthcare and education. 

Why does this matter beyond Italy? 

Most European governments are moving in the opposite direction to Quota 100, raising retirement ages, tightening eligibility, curtailing early exit. The Italian case offers a warning from an unusual angle: not about raising the retirement age, but about what happens when a selective benefit creates sharp dividing lines between otherwise similar workers. 

The authors suggest that the psychological and political costs of eligibility cutoffs may well exceed the fiscal savings that selective reforms are designed to achieve, a calculation that policymakers designing targeted pension interventions elsewhere would do well to consider. 

Interested in conducting research into the impacts of pension reforms with SHARE data? CLICK HERE.

Article: Fiorentino, R. & Mandile, S. (2026). The Unintended Costs of Early Retirement Policies: Evidence from Italy's Quota 100 Reform. CESifo Working Paper 12518. 

Picture: Adobe Stock / cristianstorto – stock.adobe.com