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....

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...

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...

In this paper we investigate why and to what extent the government should have a social security trust fund, and how it should manage the fund in the face of demographic shocks, based on a simple overlapping-generations model. We show that, given an aging population, a trust fund in some form...

It is well known that the funding status of state and local government defined benefit pension plans, as measured by the accounting methodology prescribed by the Governmental Accounting Standards Board (GASB), improves when the plans take on more investment risk. This paper documents several...

This paper suggests that the nature of the funding of defined benefit pension plans may be an important reason why personal saving has not responded positively to the high real interest rites and tax incentives to encourage saving and investment of the last few years. From a firm's standpoint,...

Social Security trust fund portfolio diversification to include some equities reduces the equity premium by raising the safe real interest rate. This requires changes in taxes. Under the hypothesis of constant marginal returns to risky investments, trust fund diversification lowers the price of...

An economic theory of public and private pensions is developed, and the implications of the theory are compared with some empirical evidence, of both the econometric and casual varieties. Among the questions addressed are: why are there private pensions? why have they grown so rapidly in recent...

We propose a general analytical framework to model the redistributive features of alternative pension systems when individuals face ex ante differences in mortality. Differences in life expectancy between high and low socioeconomic groups are often large and have widened recently in many...