The two main savings vehicles designed for accumulating assets for retirement are individual retirement accounts (IRAs) and employment-based retirement savings plans such as 401(k) plans. This paper examines the ownership of IRAs (in aggregate, but not by type) and 401(k)-type plans by Americans...

The use of target-date funds (TDFs) in 401(k) plans has increased rapidly in recent years. The percentage of all 401(k) plan participants using TDFs increased from 25 percent in 2007 to 31 percent in 2008. One of the reasons for this growth is that TDFs have been a popular choice for the default...

Individual retirement accounts (IRAs) hold more than 25 percent of all retirement assets in the United States. A substantial portion of these assets originated in other tax-qualified retirement plans, such as defined benefit (pension) and 401(k) plans, and were moved to IRAs through rollovers....

This paper is the second examination of asset allocation from the EBRI IRA Database. The EBRI IRA Database is an ongoing project of the Employee Benefit Research Institute that currently contains information on 14.85 million accounts of 11.1 million unique individuals with total assets of $1.002...