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The Impact of Working at an Employee-Owned Firm and Working from Home on Job Satisfaction

"[J]ob satisfaction is higher for employees in ESOPs than for observationally similar workers in non-ESOP firms and for [work from home (WFH)] workers than for their non-WFH peers.... ESOPs raise satisfaction by increasing worker participation on collective workplace or firm decisions while WFH raise satisfaction by increasing worker flexibility in their individual work activity.... ESOPs had more extensive WFH than non-ESOP firms during the COVID-19 pandemic."

Should Public Retirement Plans be Fully Funded?

Excerpt: A common argument for full funding is that pensions are a form of deferred compensation that does not justify a debt. The paper examines public finance, political economy, and financial market issues that bear on optimal funding, broadly and in a series of models.

Linking Benefits to Investment Performance in U.S. Public Pension Systems

"This paper calculates the effect that introducing risk-sharing during either retirement or the working life would have on public sector pension liabilities. [The first model considers] the introduction of a variable annuity for the retirement phase, modeled on the Wisconsin Retirement System, in which positive benefit adjustments are granted only if asset returns surpass 5% but benefits cannot fall below their initial levels. This change would reduce unfunded accrued liabilities by around 25%, and would lower the annual contribution increases required to target full funding in 30 years by 11%. If there is no minimum benefit guarantee, the impact of introducing variable annuities is substantially larger: the unfunded liability would fall by over half and required annual contribution increases would fall by 44%."