Winner of the 1998 Paul A. Samuelson Award given by TIAA-CREF, The Evolution of Retirement is the first comprehensive economic history of retirement in America. With life expectancies steadily increasing, the retirement rate of men over age 64 has risen drastically. Dora L. Costa looks at factors underlying this increase and shows the dramatic implications of her findings for both the general public and the U.S. government. Using statistical, and demographic concepts, Costa sheds light on such important topics as rising incomes and retirement, work and disease, the job prospects of older workers, living arrangements of the elderly, the development of a retirement lifestyle, and pensions and politics.

"[Costa's] major contribution is to show that, even without Social Security and Medicare, retirement would have expanded dramatically."—Robert J. Samuelson, New Republic

"An important book on a topic which has become popular with historians and is of major significance to politicians and economists."—Margaret Walsh, Business History

This book provides valuable information and analysis to managers, policymakers, and investment counselors in the rapidly expanding field of pension funding. American workers, too, need answers and insights on how to invest their money and plan for their retirement. fifteen of America's leading financial analysts address such pressing questions as
-What is the current financial status of the elderly, and how vulnerable are they to inflation?
-What is the impact of inflation on the private pension system, and what are the effects of alternative indexing schemes?
-What roles can the social security system play in the provision of retirement income?
-What is the effect of the tax code and the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA) on corporate pension policy?
-How well funded are corporate pension plans, and is a firm's unfunded pension liability fully reflected in the market value of its common stock?
Many of the conclusions these experts reach contradict and challenge popular views, thus providing fertile ground for innovation in pension planning.

For anyone with an interest in pensions—workers and employers, personnel directors, accountants, actuaries, lawyers, insurance agents, financial analysts, government officials, and social scientists—this book is required reading. Now, without the aid of a pension specialist, anyone can determine how their particular pension plan stacks up against the average. Using virtually all available government sources (including computerized data unavailable in print) and their own extensive surveys, the authors present a comprehensive description of the structural features and financial conditions of U.S. private, state, city, and municipal pension plans. The introductions to the hundreds of tables explain and  highlight the information.

The picture that emerges of the "typical" plan and its significant variations is crucial to all those with a financial stake in pensions. The reader can compare pension vesting, retirement, and benefit provisions by plan type, plan size, industry, union status, and many more characteristics. With this information, workers can evaluate just how generous their employer is; job applicants can compare fringe benefits of prospective employers; personnel directors can judge their competitive edge.

The financial community will find especially interesting the analysis of the unfunded liabilities of private, state, and local pension funds. The investment decisions of private and public pension funds and their return performances are described as well.

Government officials and social scientists will find the analysis of pension coverage, the receipt of pension income by the elderly, cost-of-living adjustments, and disability insurance of special importance in evaluating the proper degree of public intervention in the area of old age income support.

Pensions in the American Economy is comprehensive and easy to use. Every reader, from small-business owners and civil servants to pension fund specialists, will find in it essential information about this increasingly important part of labor compensation and retirement finances.

Sluggish economic growth, rising unemployment, and a rapidly aging population all exert financial pressure on public pension systems and highlight the need for major reform. Martin Schludi traces the political process of pension reform in Austria, France, Germany, Italy, and Sweden from the 1980s onward and skillfully analyzes the various political and economic factors in pension reform, such as gaining public support for policy initiatives. Schludi also considers case studies that range from successfully restructured pension arrangements to complete policy failures. This volume is an essential and valuable resource that demystifies the complex factors involved in social policy reforms driven by fiscal concerns.

What accounts for the striking decline in labor force participation at increasingly younger ages? Social Security and Retirement around the World examines one explanation: social security programs actually provide incentives for early retirement. This volume houses a set of remarkable papers that present information on the social security systems, and labor force participation patterns, in Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
 
"This book is highly recommended for the serious student of retirement age trends and social security old-age pension policies of industrial nations in a cross-national context." Martin B. Tracy, Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare
 
“A path-breaking public-policy study. The authors consistently use a new methodology to evaluate the consequences of retirement systems on the behavior of older workers in eleven industrialized countries. In doing so, the book passes a major test of any conference volume the whole greatly exceeds the sum of its parts. This book without question provides the most consistent cross-national analyses of the work disincentives of retirement programs ever produces. Moreover it will serve as the model for all future efforts of this kind.” Journal of Economics

During the last decade worries about population aging, increases in national expenditures for the elderly, and the trend toward early retirement have aroused new concerns about the future of old-age security. Myles and Quadagno have assembled a collection of original essays that examine how different countries have responded to these issues.

The essays in Part I explore the recent politics of old age in Great Britain, Canada, Poland, Scandinavia, West Germany, France, the Netherlands, Japan, and Australia. They demonstrate that while, during the Reagan and Thatcher era, the United States and Great Britain forged debates about old-age policies around a neo-conservative agenda, other countries facing similar matters followed different paths. In Part II, the authors examine how transformations in labor- market practices are gradually altering the status of older workers and with it our conventional understanding of old age.

The reconstruction of the international division of labor, the shift of employment from goods to services, and the adoption of new, knowledge-intensive technologies are changing the economic and political basis of the organization of old age. As we move toward the next century, these essays provide a starting point for a new generation of studies in the political economy of aging.

Why did the United States lag behind Germany, Britain, and Sweden in adopting a national plan for the elderly? When the Social Security Act was finally enacted in 1935, why did it depend on a class-based double standard? Why is old age welfare in the United States still less comprehensive than its European counterparts? In this sophisticated analytical chronicle of one hundred years of American welfare history, Jill Quadagno explores the curious birth of old age assistance in the United States. Grounded in historical research and informed by social science theory, the study reveals how public assistance grew from colonial-era poor laws, locally financed and administered, into a massive federal bureaucracy.