This paper explores the determinants of pension funding in the public sector. We formulate and test several hypotheses about the determinants of public employer pension funding practices, using a new data set describing financial and other characteristics of state, local, and teacher plans. The data show that, on average, public sector pension plans were relatively well-funded during the late 1980s. There were, however, wide variations in funding practices in our sample. Our analysis of these variations suggests that past funding practice tends to be perpetuated, that unionized employers are less likely to fully fund future pension obligations, and that funding is sensitive to fiscal pressure.

The purpose of this note is to propose a decomposition of the Gini index of inequality into within and between subpopulations using the Lerman-Yitzhaki covariance method. The present method suggests that once the population is arranged in ascending order of income and assigned ranks, the same ranks will be used to calculate total as well as between inequality. In this way, it differs from the one suggested by Jacques Silber (1989) in the measurement of between inequality and, thereby, in the interaction term.

Yannis M. Ioannides, Stuart S. Rosenthal, Estimating the Consumption and Investment Demands for Housing and Their Effect on Housing Tenure Status, The Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 76, No. 1 (Feb., 1994), pp. 127-141

We consider two competing theories that provide potentially important explanations of price rigidity. The first theory argues that prices are sticky at the aggregate level because of the cumulative effects of relatively short adjustment lags at the firm level. In contrast, the second theory argues that aggregate prices are slow to adjust because individual prices are slow to adjust. We estimate a structural model in which imperfectly competitive firms set prices in order to maximize profits subject to quadratic costs of price adjustment. The results suggest that to the extent that aggregate price rigidity exists, it can be explained by sluggishness of individual price adjustment. However, prices at both the aggregate and individual level are found to adjust rapidly to nominal cost innovations.