Human Resources Management Commons^™

Evaluating Kentucky State Pension Plans In The 2000s And Best Practices Moving Forward, Sarah Alegria

MPA/MPP/MPFM Capstone Projects

The Commonwealth of Kentucky sponsors three different pension retirement systems. This includes Kentucky Employee Retirement System, Teacher’s Retirement System, and Kentucky’s Judicial Form of Retirement System. Kentucky has one of the worst funded pension retirement plans and is currently facing shortfalls of about $43 billion (PEW, 2013). Between 1998-2008, Commonwealth of Kentucky’s legislators made many detrimental policy decisions that negatively affected its Pension Retirement System. The most impacting includes:

• Enhancements of Benefits in the Nineties
• Changing Final Compensation from the average of five-years to the average of three-years
• Mandated Yearly Cost of Living Adjustments (COLA)
• Not requiring the State to …

Can Maternity Benefits Have Long-Term Effects On Childbearing? Evidence From Soviet Russia, Olga Malkova

Economics Faculty Publications

This paper quantifies the effects of Russia’s 1981 expansion in maternity benefits on completed childbearing. The program provided one year of partially paid parental leave and a small cash transfer upon a child’s birth. I exploit the program’s two-stage implementation and find evidence that women had more children as a result of the program. Fertility rates rose immediately by 8.2% over twelve months. The increase in fertility rates not only persisted for the ten-year duration of the program, but it reflected large increases in higher-order births to older women who already had children before the program started.