The objectives of this research are to investigate the economic motives of firms in designing implicit labor contracts with pension plans, and their consequences for the employment and incomes of older workers. A central feature of the research is the cross-national comparison of these issues in the U.S. and Japan. This international comparison will permit a study of the effects of different institutional, macroeconomic and demographic factors which shape private pension plans and job mobility patterns in the two countries, but that are constant across plans in any one country. In the proposed research, comparable datasets will be constructed for both countries in which individual and firm characteristics are linked to pension plan characteristics by firm size and industry. For the U.S., the research will draw on specially linked Current Population Surveys (CPS) and the Level of Benefits pension surveys; for Japan, the Employment Status Survey (a CPS-like survey) and three retirement benefits surveys will be used. Using these data, models will first be estimated relating pension coverage and plan feature to individual and industry variables hypothesized to affect the employer's demand for enduring worker-firm job attachment. The second part of the project investigates the effects of pension coverage and plan features on the likelihood of job change, on job duration and total compensation.
