Defined Contribution Plans and the Distribution of Pension Wealth

Over the past 20 years, the defined benefit (DB) plan has been replaced by the defined contribution (DC) plan as the most popular form of pension plan. This study examines the likely consequences of this transformation for both the level and distribution of future pension wealth using a sample of DB and DC plans from the Survey of Consumer Finances. The results reveal that the shift from DB to DC plans is likely to simultaneously increase the level and inequality of pension wealth at retirement. The evidence also suggests that the shift to DC plans may result in less pension wealth at retirement for low‐income workers, women, and minorities.     

Climbing the Job Ladder: New Evidence of Gender Inequity

An explanation for the gender wage gap is that women are less able or less willing to “climb the job ladder.” However, the empirical evidence on gender differences in job mobility has been mixed. Focusing on a subsample of younger, university‐educated workers from an Australian longitudinal survey, we find strong evidence that the dynamics of promotions and employer changes worsen women’s labor market position.     

Work is a Four‐Letter Word: The Economics of Work in Historical and Critical Perspective*

The article highlights and explains the neglect of the activity of work in much of the mainstream economics literature. The neglect of work is seen to have denied space for mainstream economists to engage with the full range of possibilities for progress in human well‐being. The article also considers perspectives on work from within heterodox or non‐mainstream economics and argues that these perspectives provide a superior foundation for the theorization of work.     

A Simple Econometric Approach for Utility-Based Asset Pricing Models

Utility-based models of asset pricing may be estimated with or without assuming a distribution for security returns; both approaches are developed and compared here. The chief strength of a parametric estimator lies in its computational simplicity and statistical efficiency when the added distributional assumption is true. In contrast, the nonparametric estimator is robust to departures from any particular distribution, and it is more consistent with the spirit underlying utility-based asset pricing models since the distribution of asset returns remains unspecified even in the empirical work. The nonparametric approach turns out to be easy to implement with precision nearly indistinguishable from its parametric counterpart in this particular application. The application shows that log utility is consistent with the data over the period 1926–1981.