The Problem with Pension Portability

This article is about pension portability, but the problems addressed are important and general ones affecting all types of employee benefits. All employee benefits are part of the compensation package and, as such, all are designed to pursue certain employment-related goals. Portability of health care benefits, for example, poses issues similar to those posed by pension portability. Regulation on that issue, and indeed regulation of all employee benefits, occurs in the context of uncertainty about the costs of regulation and its distributional effects and about its effect on the continued willingness of employers to offer the benefit.

This article is intended both as an exploration of the issue of pension portability and as a case study of the challenges posed to lawmakers as they consider regulation of employee benefits generally.