While no longer common in the private sector, most public sector employers offer retiree health insurance (RHI) as a retirement benefit to their employees. While these plans are thought to be an important tool for employers to attract, retain, motivate, and ultimately retire workers, they...

1. Retirement benefits in the public sector : the role of retiree health plans -- 2. The economics of retiree health insurance benefits -- 3. Descriptions of state retiree health plans -- 4. Funding and liabilities of state retiree health plans -- 5. Explaining the differences in financial...

We analyze the incidence of public-employee health benefits. Because these benefits are negotiated through the political process, relevant labor market institutions deviate significantly from the competitive, private-sector benchmark. Empirically, we find that roughly 15 percent of the cost of...

Most private sector workers with employer-provided health insurance have a strong incentive to continue working until Medicare eligibility in order to maintain group health coverage. However, most government employees have access to retiree health coverage, which allows them access to group...

Despite the widespread provision of retiree health insurance for public sector workers, little attention has been paid to its effects on employee retirement. This is in contrast to the large literature on health-insurance-induced "job-lock" in the private sector. I use the introduction of...

Economic theory predicts that employer-provided retiree health insurance benefits crowd-out household wealth accumulation. Nevertheless, there is little research on the impacts of retiree health insurance on wealth accruals, so this paper utilizes a unique data file on three baseline cohorts...