Abstract

Corporate pension plans represent a large and growing force in the capital market. Their promised benefits comprise a large portion of the expected retirement income of millions of employees. Because of this importance, and because of some widely publicized abuses and scandals, these plans were the subject of increased governmental regulation in the 1970s. One outgrowth of this has been the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) under which the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation (PBGC) provides insurance of pension benefits. The objective of this paper is to develop a multiperiod model of the pension plan in order (1) to evaluate the robustness of prior analyses of the wealth transfers caused by the passage of ERISA among workers, firms, and the PBGC; (2) to characterize the nature of a PBGC insurance scheme which could, if it were so desired, reduce the potential liability of the PBGC; and (3) to serve as a prototype for modeling the multiperiod pension plan.

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