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...

This study argues that the promotion of union goals could have positive, negative, or neutral effects on risk adjusted return performance. Moreover, the union's ability and incentive to use pension assets to promote union goals will vary with the design of the pension. Using panel data on over...

Since 1990, most pension plans have shifted the responsibility for directing pension assets to the employee. This study summarizes some of the possible explanations for this rapid shift toward participant direction and uses IRS Form 5500 data to investigate the effect of worker and plan...

This paper presents the results of an experiment that is designed to examine how information presentation and complexity impact retirement-savings behavior. The experiment is performed twice, using both a Qualtrics panel of new employees and a sample of business school students. In this...

Several studies show that employees with firm-specific skills are more likely to be covered by employer-sponsored pension schemes than workers with general skills. Therefore it can be expected that workers with firm-specific skills retire earlier. This paper tests this prediction using US data...

To analyze the effect of health on work, many studies use a simple self-assessed health measure based upon a question such as "do you have an impairment or health problem limiting the kind or amount of work you can do?" A possible drawback of such a measure is the possibility that different...

Employer-provided health insurance may restrict job mobility, resulting in "job lock." Previous research on job lock finds mixed results using several methodologies. We take a new approach to examine job-lock by exploiting the discontinuity created at age 65 through the qualification for...

This study examines the consequences of a pension fund investing in the stock of the sponsoring firm. Using a merger of data on pension asset holdings from IRS Form 5500 filings and financial data on the company's stock from CRSP, two broad questions are addressed: First, what factors influence...

Governments are increasingly concerned about the capacity of pensions systems to meet demands in the coming years. According to the OECD, one part of the policy response in many countries will be greater private provision on the part of individuals through occupational and other pension...