Behavioral economics perspectives on public sector pension plans. NBER Working Paper No

Klopfer for their help in going through state, county and city pension documents, calling many public pension offices, and compiling and analyzing the resulting data. Karl Scholz and the other participants in the NBER State and Local Pensions Conference provided many helpful comments. Financial support from the National Institute on Aging (grants R01-AG021650 and P01-AG005842) is gratefully acknowledged. The opinions and conclusions expressed are solely those of the authors. 2 Abstract: We describe the pension plan features of the states and the largest cities and counties in the U.S. Unlike in the private sector, defined benefit (DB) pensions are still the norm in the public sector. However, a few jurisdictions have shifted towards defined contribution (DC) plans as their primary savings plan, and fiscal pressures are likely to generate more movement in this direction. Holding fixed a public employee’s work and salary history, we show that DB retirement income replacement ratios vary greatly across jurisdictions. This creates large variation in workers ’ need to save for retirement in other accounts. There is also substantial heterogeneity across jurisdictions in the savings generated in primary DC plans because o