We examine who bears the costs of mandated workplace pension programs, exploiting the quasi-experimental rollout of automatic enrollment in the UK. Total compensation (take-home pay plus employer contributions) increases, driven by employer contributions, while the amount of take-home pay...

I review the academic literature on defined contribution retirement plan design and participant behavior. While adoption of automatic enrollment has significantly increased participation rates, recent studies find the long-run effects on savings are smaller than the short-run effects, with some...

Questions are often raised about who is entitled to death or survivor benefits from a federally regulated employee benefit plan, whether for federal employees, or for private employees by a plan governed by ERISA. The following principles generally resolve these questions: • Federal law does...

The primary motivation for retirement savings policy is the view that many of us, if left to our own devices, will not save enough for retirement. Special tax subsidies for employer-sponsored retirement plans — a principal component of the federal policy scheme — have made such plans the...

An important concern for pension policy is the unequal distribution of retirement benefits. Differences in employer-sponsored pension wealth are especially pronounced between men and women. This report examines gender differences in pension benefits among the elderly and differences in coverage...

Recent declines in job tenure have coincided with a shift away from traditional defined benefit (DB) pensions, which reward long tenure. New evidence also points to an increase in job-to-job movements by workers, and we document gains in relative wages of job-to-job movers over a similar period....

To establish existing savings behavior, it is necessary to estimate the percentage of workers with an employment-based retirement plan, and to know the characteristics of workers with and without a plan - the subject of this paper. The findings show that there has been a significant increase in...

Recent empirical findings by Allan and Clark (NBER WP1677, 1985) show that the pension wealth of union beneficiaries is dramatically greater than that of nonunion beneficiaries. Other findings by these and other authors show that union pension plans are more likely to be underfunded. Ippolito...