New Uses of Health and Pension Information: The 5500 File at the Census Bureau:Technical paper

摘要

The accurate measurement of employer-provided health and pension plan coverage is critically important for policy makers seeking to make state, local and national decisions that will affect the wellbeing of the current and future infirm and elderly population. However, current information could be vastly improved by improving estimates of coverage and by bettering the firm level information currently available. We propose to exploit an underutilized resource the 5500 file to achieve this improvement. The 5500 file, which contains data from annual returns filed annually with the Internal Revenue Service by all employers covered by ERISA, provides information on employee benefit plans, including data on different types of pension and health insurance plans.