One of the most important financial decisions that pension participants make concerns how they access their pension assets when they terminate employment with their plan sponsor. Their choices depend both on own preferences and the options offered by their retirement plan. This paper examines...

Economist and public policy analysts have devoted considerable research to examining the work and retirement decisions of employees. Much less effort has been spent on understanding the concerns and challenges of employers if their workers delay retirement and remain on the job until older ages....

We investigate how the Japanese pension market for funded employment-based pensions is changing and how it might be strengthened in order to better serve one of the most rapidly aging populations in the world. Public and private pensions in Japan are estimated to hold around US$3 trillion,...

The American population is aging and changes in the population’s age structure are leading to an aging of the nation’s workforce. In addition, changes to age specific participation rates are exacerbating the aging of the national labor force. An important challenge for firms and...

The objective of this paper is to determine Americans’ mobility patterns into and out of poverty in their later years. We track how older adults enter into and exit from poverty using the most extensive longitudinal survey on older Americans currently available, the Health and Retirement Study...

How household wellbeing responds to pandemic-induced financial shocks likely depends on whether people undertake certain actions that enhance their ability to withstand adverse economic events, along with their ability to efficiently respond to the shocks when they occur. This paper examines...

The prevailing wisdom in media accounts is that job stability has vanished, especially for those in large corporations. Academic studies of job stability have found little difference between the 1990s and earlier decades, but these studies have not been able to focus on large firms. This paper...

Previous studies have found that workers who are covered by pensions are much less likely than other workers to leave their jobs, but the evidence on how specific pension characteristics affect turnover is inconclusive. This paper examines how mobility is affected by vesting standards, the...

Unlike private sector employers, public school districts generally offer more than one type of supplemental retirement savings plan and allow multiple vendors to offer products. Using individual-level payroll data from over half of the public school districts in North Carolina coupled with data...

Many firms give post-retirement increases in pension benefits to retirees even though the pension contract does not require such increases. A leading explanation of this behavior is that benefit increases are part of an implicit contract where retirees accept lower initial benefits in return for...