Cost Saving and the Freezing of Corporate Pension Plans

Joshua D. Rauh, Irina Stefanescu and Stephen Zeldes

No 27251, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Companies that freeze defined benefit pension plans save the equivalent of 13.5 percent of the long-horizon payroll of current employees. Furthermore, firms with higher prospective accruals are more likely to freeze their plans. Cost savings would not be possible in a benchmark model in which i) all workers receive compensation equal to their marginal product and ii) workers value equally all identical-cost forms of pension benefits. We find evidence consistent both with firms’ reneging on implicit contracts to provide workers with high pension accruals later in their careers and with shifts in employee valuation of different forms of retirement benefits.

JEL-codes: G14 G23 G32 J31 J32 J33 J38 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age and nep-lma
Note: AG CF LS PE
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Published as Joshua D. Rauh & Irina Stefanescu & Stephen P. Zeldes, 2020. "Cost saving and the freezing of corporate pension plans," Journal of Public Economics, vol 188.

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