This paper summarizes the findings of the joint Wharton Financial Institutions Center and KPMG study of the retirement assets market and the role of life insurance companies within it. The study began with the following goals:<p> Investigate how people save for retirement and whether this is...</p>

Private sector pension plans have undergone substantial change in form and structure in the United States over the last two decades. This paper explores and evaluates these changes using information on pension plan characteristics gathered by the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) since 1980 in...

Analysts have raised serious questions about current workers' ability and inclination to save enough for retirement. This is of obvious policy interest given the need to reform national retirement income programs. In the present paper we examine recent research developments regarding retirement...

Public sector pension plans are managed in diverse ways, with governance policies distinguished according to their board composition and size, how the trustees structure their investment decisions, what restrictions are placed on their investments, and whether they have independent performance...

This paper describes how three money’s worth measures – the benefit-to-tax ratio, the internal rate of return, and the net present value – are calculated and used in analyses of social security reforms, including systems with privately managed individual accounts invested in equities....

Retirement systems should be conceived of as long-term financial contracts under which workers' contributions today are exchanged for benefits paid to the elderly tomorrow. Such contracts are said to be well-managed if the transactions are handled in an affordable, reliable, and efficient...

We explore four issues concerning annuitization options that retirees might use in the decumulation phase of an "individual accounts" retirement saving system. First, we investigate the operation of both real and nominal annuity individual annuity markets in the United Kingdom. The widespread...