Tax-Deferred Retirement Savings Flags for Wave 1 HRS Respondents As part of the Wave 1 data collection for the Health & Retirement study, an effort was made to collect pension plan information from respondents' employers. The 401k.da file contains flags for those HRS respondents whose pension plans were successfully collected. The fields are as follows: "CaseID" is the HRS case ID, variable 1 in the HRS data. "HouseholdID/Person Number" is the Household / Person Number ID for the related CaseID. "Job Code" represents either a current job (F job), the last job held if not currently employed (G job), or the last most significant job if currently employed (H Job). [F Job = 1 , G Job = 2, H Job = 3 ] "Plan Type" is non-zero if a deferred tax voluntary retirement savings plan is offered by the employer. This flag indicates how the plan that includes the deferred savings plan was classified by the pension coder. 1 = Defined Benefit 2 = Defined Contribution and 3 = Combination Plan. The defined benefit instrument allowed for the definition of a voluntary deferred savings plan, and in a few circumstances, coders used this definition to expedite coding. Although there are a few instances in this file in which this flag has a value of "1", these should more properly be considered combination plans. "Deferred Tax Voluntary Retirement Savings Available" represents the availability to the respondent of a voluntary deferred tax retirement savings plan. A value of "1" indicates that such a plan is (was) clearly available to the respondent. "Plan Inception Subsequent to Respondent's Tenure" applies only to prior jobs (always has value of "0" for F jobs). A value of "1" indicates that although the employer has a deferred tax voluntary retirement savings plan, its initial date of adoption is subsequent to the respondent's termination date with the firm. "Insufficient Information to Determine Availability" applies only to prior jobs (always has value of "0" for F jobs). A value of "1" indicates that insufficient evidence exists to determine the availability to the respondent of a deferred tax voluntary retirement savings plan. A typical reason this flag is set is that the pension plan does not provide sufficient information about the effective date or the date of last amendment to determine whether the plan was available during the respondent's tenure. "Pension Coder Specifically Identifies as 401-k/403-b" has a value of "1" if the pension coder determined that the benefit was a 401-k or 403-b plan. There are other code sections that allow tax deferred voluntary savings plans (e.g., defined contribution Keoughs). If you have any questions about the file or how it was prepared, please contact Bob Peticolas at rwp1@home.com.