The proposed project will estimate and project pension wealth, that is expected present value of the pension payments over the course of the lifetime, for the oldest old. For those who are already retired, changes in the future will mainly take the form of post retirement adjustments in their benefits. For those who remain employed, pension wealth must be projected on the basis of employment in previous jobs, the current job, and on the basis of any job likely to be held in the future. Using information on cohort specific rates of pension coverage, Plan characteristics and models of the pension-mobility relation and the pension-retirement relation, pension wealth will be projected for the currently employed into their old age. The study will use nationally representative samples from the Survey of Consumer Finances with matched information on the pension plan which is provided by the employer. The data are for 1983 and 1989. To the extent possible, employer provided pension descriptions will be processed in the course of a related study, and then employed in the present study as basic information for projecting pension wealth. Special attention will be paid to trends which are affecting plan coverage, plan type and plan characteristics of each cohort. Sources of these trends include changes in industry composition, the closely related phenomenon of the decline of unions, and the changing patterns of participation over the life cycle by men and women. It may be expected that each cohort will receive pension benefits in accordance with employment history and pension characteristics that are specific to their cohort. But emerging trends will also modify the benefits paid to members of each cohort who have plans of particular types. Special attention will be paid to the likely effects of the decline in unions on the benefits paid to members of various cohorts as they age and become part of the oldest-old population. It will be expected that the pension experience of the oldest-old into the next century will mirror many of trends in pensions that have already been witnessed during the post-war period. Pension coverage spread rapidly in the nineteen forties, fifties and sixties. Consequently, the number of years of work while covered by a pension mat be expected to grow from relatively low values for those who were born in the teens and twenties to much longer periods of coverage for those born in the nineteen thirties and later. As with older generations, for those born in still later decades, the likelihood of coverage and pension values will depend on occupation, industry, inion status, sex and related factors. But these employment characteristics may have different implications for differences in pension wealth as various cohorts reach the status of oldest-old. Recent trends indicate that coverage is declining for younger cohorts, and that for all of those who are covered, there are changes in plan type. These trends are affecting secondary plans, and are fostering changes in benefit promises under defined benefit primary plans. Although it is difficult to speculate about the pensions of those who are just making their initial job matches, and are more than half a century away from entering the ranks of the oldest old, we also will attempt to take account of the effects of these emerging trends on younger generations.
