Pension Plan Provisions and Retirement: Men & Women, Medicare, and Models

Abstract

The ongoing analysis of the effects of pension plan provisions on retirement is pursued in this paper. A primary objective of this paper is to test the validity of models previously developed and estimated with data from a Fortune 500 company, here using data from a second large company. The evidence confirms that changes in the retirement rates by age correspond closely to provisions of the firm pension plan. There is essentially no difference in the retirement behavior of men and women. As in previous work, it is found that simpler "option value model" of retirement yields very similar results to the considerably more complex stochastic dynamic programming specification. Both fit the data well and predict rather well the effect on retirement of a special retirement window plan, Some consideration is also given to the effects of firm health insurance and median coverage on retirement.