An important challenge facing employees and societies is saving and investing sufficient funds for a comfortable retirement. Research shows that human financial decision-making behavior is not always rational and that public trust in the economy can be lost. Surprisingly, neither better...

To establish current savings behavior, one necessary measurement of retirement preparation is identifying the percentage of workers with employment-based retirement plans, as well as understanding the characteristics of workers with and without access to such programs. The findings from this...

To establish existing savings behavior, it is necessary to estimate the percentage of workers with an employment-based retirement plan, and to know the characteristics of workers with and without a plan - the subject of this paper. The findings show that there has been a significant increase in...

The trend towards eliminating defined benefit (DB) pension plans in favour of defined contribution (DC) plans implies that increasing numbers of pension plan participants will bear the risk that final realized portfolio values may be insufficient to fund desired retirement cash flows. We compare...

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...

Assuming the loss aversion framework of Tversky and Kahneman (1992), stochastic investment and labour income processes, and a path-dependent fund target, we show that the optimal investment strategy for defined contribution pension plan members is a target-driven ‘threshold' strategy, whereby...

This paper discusses the likelihood of a family head's participation in a retirement plan as it relates to plan type, employer size, and industry, and also examines asset allocation among 401(k)-type plan participants, defined benefit plan participants, and IRA owners

This paper examines how workers allocated their contributions and assets in their employer-sponsored retirement savings plans within the TIAA system over the 2012 to 2018 period. Consistent with previous research, we find that Lifecycle funds, an auto-diversified target-date fund with an...

This paper investigates retirees' optimal purchases of fixed and variable longevity income annuities using their defined contribution (DC) plan assets and given their expected Social Security benefits. As an alternative, we also evaluate using plan assets to boost Social Security benefits...

In this paper we compare changes in asset allocations between mutual funds held in defined contribution pension plans and funds held by other investors. We investigate how flows into equity and fixed income mutual funds depend on macroeconomic conditions. We find that defined contribution plans...