During the 1970s, defined benefit pension plans increased their liabilities by giving benefit increases to persons no longer working even though almost none of the plans were required to do so by any legally enforceable contract. Our model of these adjustments has workers and firms agreeing to...

A well-known, if underappreciated, finding in the mobility literature is that turnover is much lower in jobs covered by pensions than in other jobs. This could result from capital losses for job changes created by most benefit formulas, the tendency of turnover-prone individuals to avoid jobs...

In this paper we examine how the structures of earnings, Social Security, and pension benefits affect retirement behavior. We use an intertemporal model of labor supply, paying special attention to the institutional features of private pensions and Social Security benefits. This theoretical...

Whether and how the labor market will adapt to anticipated changes in the workforce age distribution depends on how able companies are to induce desired turnover patterns among older and younger employees. This paper contends that companies can and will use pension plan provisions as powerful...

Interindustry factor mobility is a crucial determinant of the income-distribution effects of exogenous changes in relative commodity prices. This examination of interindustry variation in wages and profits using data from manufacturing industries from ...