An increasing number of individuals will be unable to retire comfortably amidst an international retirement savings crisis. Research suggests that behavioral factors contribute to inadequate retirement savings. We present a procedure that reframes the retirement savings decision, aimed at alleviating some of the negative effects of the behavioral…

Rising costs of public employee pension plans are a source of fiscal stress in many cities and states and have led to calls for reform. To assess the economic consequences of plan changes it is important to have reliable statistical models of employee retirement behavior. The authors estimate a structural model of teacher retirement using…

Why aren't teacher salaries rising? This puzzle can be explained by three trends eating into teachers' take-home pay: rising health care costs, declining student/teacher ratios, and rising retirement costs. Retirement costs are the most hidden of these three factors. The result is that most teachers are getting the worst of both worlds. Teachers…

We use data from workers in the largest public-sector occupation in the United States -- teaching -- to examine the effect of pension enhancements on employee retention. Specifically, we study a 1999 enhancement to the benefit formula for public school teachers in St. Louis that resulted in an immediate and dramatic increase in their incentives to…

In this paper, we present an analysis of the Arkansas Teacher Retirement System (ATRS) pension plan and an empirical investigation of the behavioral response to that plan, as well as to a possible reform plan. We begin by describing the plan parameters and discussing the incentives these parameters create. We then estimate the effect of pension…

This paper exploits a major, unanticipated reform of the California teachers' pension to provide quasi-experimental evidence on the link between pension generosity and retirement timing. Using two large administrative datasets, the author conducts a reduced-form analysis of the pension reform and estimates a structural model of retirement timing.…

This research examined the influence of delay and anticipated health and enjoyment on the amount of retirement savings sacrificed for early retirement. In addition to testing and supporting predictions that willingness to sacrifice retirement savings would be less with shorter delays to retirement, greater anticipated health, and greater…

Policy discussions about teacher quality and teacher "shortages" often focus on recruitment and retention of young teachers. However, attention has begun to focus on the incentive effects of teacher retirement benefit systems, particularly given their rising costs and the large unfunded liabilities. In this paper we analyze accrual of…

The retirement behavior of Pennsylvania public school teachers in 1997-98 and 1998-99, a period when state early retirement incentives were temporarily increased, is modeled using a choice framework that emphasizes both pecuniary and nonpecuniary factors of the retirement decision under a defined benefit retirement plan. We find each to have large…