养老金能否提升工作努力并选择性留任优秀员工？——来自公立学校的证据

中文摘要

雇主为何提供养老金？本文实证考察两种理论解释：养老金能够提升员工的工作努力，以及能够选择性留任优秀员工。我们利用公立学校教师在养老金领取资格门槛附近的丰富行政数据，涵盖教师的工作努力与产出，对上述假设进行检验。当教师跨过该门槛后，由于养老金累积额大幅减少，其有效薪酬下降幅度超过工资的50%。标准经济模型预测，这一有效薪酬削减会降低教师的工作努力与产出，但我们并未观察到此类下降。这表明，年度养老金累积额并未显著提升工作努力。同样，如果养老金能够选择性留任更优秀的教师，那么当留任激励在该门槛处消失时，教师的平均质量应当下降。然而，我们发现教师队伍构成并未发生变化，这表明在该门槛附近，养老金并未选择性留任绩效更高的教师。

Abstract

Why do employers offer pensions? We empirically investigate two rationales, namely that they improve worker effort and selectively retain good workers. We test these hypotheses using rich administrative data on effort and output for public school teachers around the pension-eligibility threshold. When teachers cross the threshold, their effective compensation falls by over 50 percent of salary due to sharply reduced pension accruals. Standard economic models predict that this effective pay cut reduces teacher effort and output, but we observe no such decline. This suggests that yearly pension accruals do not meaningfully increase effort. Similarly, if pensions selectively retain better teachers, we would expect average teacher quality to decline when the retentive incentive disappears at the threshold. Instead, we find no change in workforce composition, suggesting pensions do not selectively retain higher-performing teachers around the threshold.