Earlier claims that pensions serve as severance pay are corroborated by a new data set drawn from the 1980 Banker's Trust corporate pension plan study. A model is developed that shows how pension values which vary with the age of retirement make both workers and firms better off by moving the...

This paper studies cost of living adjustments in pensions from the perspective of labor economics. Evidence from longitudinal data on pension and annuity incomes of retirees suggests that pension COLAs are less important in the 1980s than in the 1970s, but that through 1987 they continued to...

Some contend the US labor market will fail to adapt smoothly to an aging workforce, whereas others argue that employee pensions can and will play an important role in helping companies induce desired turnover patterns. This paper undertakes a longitudinal examination of pension retirement...

Workers covered by defined benefit pension plans receive lower benefits at retirement if they leave their current job before reaching retirement age. This study estimates the magnitude of this pension loss for workers in the May 1983 supplement of the Current Population Survey, using pension...

This study illustrates and interprets changes in pension plan retirement formulas and benefit provisions over the last two decades, using extensive information on private sector pension plans gathered by the U.S. Department of Labor since 1980. Data generated from the Employee Benefits Survey...

Defined Benefit and Defined Contribution plans have significantly different characteristics with respect to the risks faced by employers and employees, the sensitivity of benefits to inflation, the flexibility of funding, and the importance of governmental supervision. In this paper, we examine...

The manifest purposes of integrating an employer-provided pension plan with social security are:(1) to ensure retirement income adequacy for all covered employees; and (2) to ensure retirement income equity, defined as equal total replacement rates for all employees regardless of salary level....

If the intent of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, ERISA, was to assure that beneficiaries of insolvent pension plans receive adequate pension benefits, sharp increases in nominal rates of interest have blunted that purpose. Without an increase in these rates, the Pension Benefit...

Pensions and age specific death rates are intertwined in several ways. Pensions provide a mechanism to remove the uncertainty about date of death from consumption planning. Age specific death rates determine the cost and value of pensions. In this paper, we use the Retirement History Survey to...