How can retirement savings be increased? We explore a unique policy change in the context of the German pension system to study this question. As of 2005 (with a phase-in period between 2002-04), the German pension administration started to send out annual letters providing detailed and...

This article calls attention to the Department of Labor's imposition of the “prudent investor rule” on financial advisers to retirement savers. The article also canvasses the customary role of an investment policy statement in promoting compliance with the prudent investor rule by...

This paper examines the role of the shift in pension plans — from Defined Benefit to Defined Contribution — in explaining the recent increase in labor supply of older workers. A structural model of consumption, savings, Social Security, and pension plan heterogeneity is estimated using data...

Default features in defined-contribution plans are designed to improve the retirement security of plan participants. To date, these have focused on the challenge of saving, ignoring the more complex challenge of dissaving. Automatic default provisions for drawing down participant account...

There exists a wide variety of tax treatments of pensions across the world. And the reasons for such a range of regimes are not clear. This note reviews the general principles of pension taxes and analyses the theoretical foundations of why pension incomes ought to be taxed specifically. To do...

There exists a wide variety of tax treatments of pensions across the world. And the reasons for such a range of regimes are not clear. This note reviews the general principles of pension taxes and analyses the theoretical foundations of why pension incomes ought to be taxed specifically. To do...

About 5 million state and local government workers, including 1.2 million public school teachers concentrated in 15 states, are not enrolled in Social Security. In order to ensure that those workers receive adequate benefits, Congress requires state and local government employers to offer...

This paper presents issues examined and discussed by participants at the Employee Benefit Research Institute's spring policy forum in Washington, DC, held May 5, 2005. EBRI President Dallas Salisbury said the forum was designed to pull together research that touched on the "total integration of...

Many nations incentivize retirement saving by letting workers defer taxes on pension contributions, imposing them when retirees withdraw their funds. Using a dynamic life cycle model, we show how 'Rothification' - that is, taxing 401(k) contributions rather than payouts - alters saving,...