The National Institute on Aging's Social and Behavioral Research Program has as a mandate the promotion of research on older individuals' health and well-being as the outcome of complex economic and social interactions, including labor markets and firm behavior toward older workers. The proposed research poses and seeks to answer three major questions in this field: 1. How do old-age pensions differ across workers and industries? 2. How can we explain these differences in private pensions? 3. How have these differences changed over time? The project will have both theoretical and empirical components. The theoretical work will develop a model to account for differences in pension systems across workers and firms, synthesizing the recent research of labor economists in the implicit contracts field. The empirical work has several goals: the first part will develop a multi-dimensional picture of how pensions differ across workers and firms with respect to plan type, benefit rules, retirement age and service requirements, and other features regulating retirement behavior. A second empirical task will be to conduct an in-depth analysis of several specific pension plans over time, to see how they changed from 1960 to 1980. The last section of the empirical work will test hypotheses generated in the earlier theoretical stage, using the CPS, EBS1, and the LOB data sets among others. The research product will help integrate the economics implicit contract literature with evidence on real-world pension institutions, which many claim force workers to retire earlier than they would otherwise wish.
