IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/uaajxx/v27y2023i1p121-147.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Multiemployer Defined Benefit Pension Plans: Employer Withdrawals and Financial Vulnerability

Author

Listed:
  • Tianxiang Shi
  • Xuesong You

Abstract

Multiemployer defined benefit pension plans are facing severe funding challenges. The Pension Protection Act of 2006 requires that a multiemployer pension plan with an actuarial funded percentage of less than 80% must take corrective actions to improve its financial health. We use a regression discontinuity design to examine the effect of funding rule requirements on employer withdrawals from multiemployer pension plans. We find that multiemployer pension plans subject to funding rule requirements are about 14 percentage points more likely to experience employer withdrawals in a 1-year period compared to plans not required to take any corrective actions. We also find that plans with ex ante employer withdrawal experiences are more vulnerable to financial shocks such as the 2008 financial crisis. Our study provides important policy implications for regulators concerning best practices to build pension plan resilience to insolvency events.

Suggested Citation

  • Tianxiang Shi & Xuesong You, 2023. "Multiemployer Defined Benefit Pension Plans: Employer Withdrawals and Financial Vulnerability," North American Actuarial Journal, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 27(1), pages 121-147, January.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:uaajxx:v:27:y:2023:i:1:p:121-147
    DOI: 10.1080/10920277.2022.2041040
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/10920277.2022.2041040
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/10920277.2022.2041040?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:uaajxx:v:27:y:2023:i:1:p:121-147. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/uaaj .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.