The Role of Pensions in the Labor Market

Employer-sponsored group pension plans offer an unusual window into long-term employment relationships. This is because the pension promise is documented in a set of explicit statements regarding future payment and employment agreements between workers and their employers. In this paper, we show that recent research on pensions in the labor market offers considerable insight into long-term labor market arrangements. Most importantly. we explore how pensions influence employee compensation. retirement, turnover, and other matters central to the determination of labors' price and quantity over time. A number of unanswered questions. and difficult-to-reconcile empirical findings, are also outlined.