Wage-Pension Trade-offs in Collective Agreements

Analyzing 98 matched collective agreements and flat benefit pension plans in Ontario in 1984, the authors find evidence of a significant trade-off between wages and an actuarially constructed summary measure of the expected future pension costs for employers. With respect to the separate components of the pension plans, they find a significant trade-off between wages and the main item that is bargained over—the flat benefit rate—but not between wages and most of the early and postponed retirement options. These results obtain when the pension variables are specified as a proportion of wages, to capture the assumption that the generosity of pension plans is reflected in replacement rates, and when simultaneous equation procedures are used to account for the possible endogeneity of pensions; the trade-off disappears, however, when the pension variables are specified in dollar amounts.