Quit rates in the federal government are abnormally low. Some economists and the federal government itself have taken this to mean that federal wages are too high. This paper provides an alternative explanation. It shows that the timing of compensation across a career as well as its level affect...

Pension economics has emerged as a separate literature over the past decade. Some of the early pension work was devoted to financial issues, including implications of pensions for savings rates and portfolio allocation. Most new developments, however, have stemmed from research surrounding labor...

The implicit pension contract has provided a theoretical basis for the observed relation between pensions, less quitting and earlier retirement. But it also has encountered difficulty explaining why wages seem "too high" in pension firms. This anomaly has been taken by some to imply that...

The classic selection effect posits that deferred wages attract "stayers." The results in this paper suggest an alternative explanation. Deferred wage contracts attract "savers." All else constant, savers are better workers than nonsavers. A firm naturally works harder to retain better workers,...