In recent decades, many states have reduced future retirement benefits for newly hired teachers. We estimate that in 2020 the average initial monthly retirement benefit, for teachers retiring with 30 years of service, is 11.2 percent lower than that of teachers retiring in the same plan with the...

Does automatic enrollment into retirement saving increase household debt? We study the randomized roll-out of automatic enrollment pensions to ~160,000 employers in the United Kingdom with 2-29 employees. We find that the additional savings generated through automatic enrollment are partially...

Using administrative data on health insurance, retirement, and leave benefits, we find within-firm variation accounts for a dramatically lower percentage of total variation in benefits than in wages. We also document sharply higher between-firm variation in nonwage benefits than in wages. We...

We review select literature on racial and ethnic disparities in retirement outcomes and the impact of outreach on such outcomes. First, there are significant disparities in retirement outcomes, reflecting a long history of racism and structural barriers. Second, there is comparatively little...

We conduct a randomized controlled trial to understand how a web-based retirement saving calculator affects workers' retirement-savings decisions. In both conditions, the calculator projects workers' retirement income goal. In the treatment condition, it also projects retirement income based on...

How accurate are older people's expectations about their future Social Security benefits? Using panel data from the Health and Retirement Study, we compare respondents' observed Social Security claiming ages and benefits with subjective expectations provided during their 50s and early 60s. We...

This paper estimates the effects on steady state retirement by men of changes in pension" plans and social security in the 1970's and 1980's. Work incentives associated with pension" coverage and plan characteristics are calculated primarily from the 1969-79 Retirement History" Study and the...

Despite the enormous gains in the economic well-being of the elderly, and the progressivity of the Social Security benefit schedule, there remains substantial inequality in financial resources. In this paper we use data from the Health and Retirement Survey to examine the distribution of pension...

Labor force participation of men over age 50 fell sharply in the UK between the early 1970s and early 1990s. Despite the fact that the state retirement pension does not become available to men until age 65, half of men aged 60-64 were economically inactive in the mid 1990s. The main element of...

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...