This paper uses data from the Health and Retirement Study to investigate the effects of Social Security's Windfall Elimination Provision (WEP) and Government Pension Offset (GPO) provision on Social Security benefits received by individuals and households. WEP reduces the benefits of individuals...

We consider the retirement behavior of civilian employees of the United States government. Unlike previous studies, this investigation is based upon a data set containing fairly complete and accurate information about the Social Security and employer-provided pensions for which employees are (or...

This paper provides an overview of an economics-based perspective on the financial aspects of state and local public pensions in the U.S. Drawing on the research commissioned for an NBER research program on this topic, we discuss the large degree to which public pension liabilities exceed the...

Around the world, Pay-As-You-Go (PAYGO) public pension programs face serious long-term fiscal problems due primarily to actual and projected population aging, and most appear unsustainable as currently structured. Some have proposed the replacement of such plans with systems of fully funded...

This paper calculates the effect that introducing risk-sharing during either retirement or the working life would have on public sector pension liabilities. We begin by considering the introduction of a variable annuity for the retirement phase, modeled on the Wisconsin Retirement System, in...

We use a sample of full-time workers over 50 years of age from the 2004 and 2006 waves of the Health and Retirement Study to investigate whether workers in federal, state, and local government receive more generous wage and pension compensation than private sector workers, ceteris paribus. With...

We explore what happened when the state of Utah moved away from its traditional defined benefit pension. In its place, it offered new hires a choice between a conventional defined contribution plan and a hybrid plan option, where the latter has both a guaranteed benefit component and a defined...

Using the known result that life-cycle investors will optimally hold portfolios whose returns are perfectly correlated with aggregate consumption, this paper uses a simple intertemporal general equilibrium model to explore the merits and feasibility of pension plans where both accumulations and...

This paper collects and analyzes available information on administrative costs associated with public and private retirement systems. We explore expenses of the US social security system and compare these with data from national systems in other countries. We find that administration costs of...

Choices regarding the disposition of wealth at retirement can have substantial implications for retirement income security. We analyze the factors determining annuity option choices offered by a public sector defined pension plan with no default annuity option. Using combined administrative...