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...

This study estimates the magnitude of pension wealth and compares pension wealth to net worth for households in the 1983 Survey of Consumer Finance (SCF). The SCF is the first data set to provide detailed information on both household finances and pension characteristics. The pension information...

A well-known, if underappreciated, finding in the mobility literature is that turnover is much lower in jobs covered by pensions than in other jobs. This could result from capital losses for job changes created by most benefit formulas, the tendency of turnover-prone individuals to avoid jobs...

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...

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,...

We report results from a field experiment in which a randomized subset of newly hired workers at a large financial institution received a flyer containing information about the employer's 401(k) plan and the value of contributions compounding over a career. Younger workers who received the flyer...

Many organizations provide retirement planning seminars to their employees as a benefit to help them make better informed retirement decisions.  This study examines the participants in 85 seminars conducted by five companies in 2008 and 2009 to determine how much learning takes place and...

Studies examining pension distribution choices have found that the tendency of private-sector workers is to select lump sum distributions instead of life annuities. In the public sector, defined benefit pensions usually offer lump sum distributions equal to employee contributions, not the...

Workers covered by defined benefit pension plans receive lower benefits at retirement if they leave their current job before reaching retirement age. This study estimates the magnitude of this pension loss for workers in the May 1983 supplement of the Current Population Survey, using pension...

This paper examines how pension plans affect employee behavior and firm performance. Theoretically, the impact of pensions on firm performance cannot be predicted. Firms with pensions should have lower turnover rates and more efficient retirement decisions; their employees will be less likely to...