There exists a wide variety of tax treatments of pensions across the world. And the reasons for such a range of regimes are not clear. This note reviews the general principles of pension taxes and analyses the theoretical foundations of why pension incomes ought to be taxed specifically. To do...

Pension plan descriptions from respondents to the 1992 Health and Retirement Study are compared with descriptions obtained from their employers. Earnings histories reported by respondents are compared with earnings histories from the Social Security Administration. The probability of linking...

This paper analyzes the relation of pension coverage and key plan characteristics to measures of union membership and strength, and to related interactions. The large and significant relationships which are found cannot be explained by, and are often inconsistent with, predictions obtained by...

From age 62 through the full retirement age, the earnings test reduces the share of married men who work full time by about four percentage points, which entails a reduction of about ten percent in the number of married men of that age at full time work. In terms of the cash flow of the system,...

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...