Evidence on the Relationship between Pension-Driven Financial Incentives and Late-Career Attrition: Implications for Pension Reform
利用华盛顿州1996年引入混合养老金计划的纵向数据，研究发现教师在达到法定退休资格门槛时，尽管面临不同的财务激励，离职行为却相似，表明教师可能锚定于资格门槛，削弱了财务激励的影响。
Retirement plans can create strong financial incentives that have important labor market implications, and many states have adopted alternative plan designs that significantly change these incentives. The authors use longitudinal data to investigate the impact of Washington State’s 1996 introduction of a hybrid retirement plan on late-career attrition. The unique setup of Washington’s plans allows them to provide empirical evidence on the influence of financial incentives created by statutory retirement eligibility thresholds. Findings show that despite facing very different financial incentives, teachers enrolled in the hybrid and traditional plans respond similarly to reaching a key retirement eligibility threshold. The authors hypothesize that teachers are anchoring to the eligibility thresholds, muting the influence of the financial incentives. They also provide evidence that, in the presence of bright-line eligibility thresholds that can anchor workers’ separation behavior, commonly used structural models may overpredict workers’ responsiveness to the financial incentives embedded in retirement plans.