Teachers? willingness to pay for retirement benefits: A national stated preferences experiment

Many states in the U.S. have recently made or are considering changes to their teacher retirement systems. However, little is known about how teachers value various elements of their retirement benefits versus other aspects of their jobs and compensation. To help alleviate this gap, we use a discrete choice stated preferences experiment embedded in a nationally representative survey of teachers to estimate their willingness-to-pay for various retirement plan characteristics and other non-salary job components. We find that, on average, early career teachers are indifferent between a traditional pension and alternative retirement plan designs. In addition, we find that teachers have stronger preferences around their expected salary replacement in retirement and retirement age than plan type. We also find that teachers' willingness-to-pay for traditional pension plans is less than their willingness-to-pay for many other elements of their compensation, including salary growth, health insurance coverage, and Social Security enrollment.