Recent defined benefit (DB) pension freezes in large healthy firms such as Verizon and IBM, as well as terminations of plans in the struggling steel and airline industries, highlight the fact that these traditional pensions cannot be viewed as risk-free promises from the employee's perspective. In this paper we develop an empirical dynamic programming framework to investigate household saving decisions in a model economy with risky DB pensions. The model incorporates important sources of uncertainty facing households, including asset returns, employment, income, and mortality, as well as pension freezes. Applying a compensating variation measure of welfare, we find that pension freezes reduce welfare by a maximum of about $6,000 for individuals with a high school degree and about $2,000 for individuals with a college degree.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.