Employee preferences for pension plan features

摘要

Data from 517 survey respondents were used to analyze the determinants of the shares of a hypothetical $1,000 budget that employees were given to allocate to cash wages and pension plan features involving early retirement, postponed retirement, and infla-tion protection. Employee preferences for pension plan features generally reflected the potential for pensions to deal with such factors as risk sharing, family lifecycle decision making, and cash constraints, as those factors were related to observable per-sonal and demographic characteristics of employees as well as to their labor market circumstances and wealth embodied in their pension plans. Amongst other implica-tions, our analysis highlights that the demand is greater for early retirement and infla-tion protection than for postponed retirement, and the demand for early retirement is likely to increase as the work force ages, dual pension families become more promi-nent, and layoffs and job changing continue.