Questions are often raised about who is entitled to death or survivor benefits from a federally regulated employee benefit plan, whether for federal employees, or for private employees by a plan governed by ERISA. The following principles generally resolve these questions: • Federal law does...

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...

Millions of defined benefit pensioners must select a pension insurance method. We present a framework for making this decision within the context of US military veterans' Survivor Benefit Plan (SBP). Federal government subsidies generate a positive expected net payout for SBP. While insurance...

On March 29, 2022 the House approved H.R. 2954 that is titled the Securing a Strong Retirement Act of 2022 (the SECURE Act 2.0) by a vote of 414-5. On May 26, 2022, a discussion draft of the Retirement Improvement and Savings Enhancement to Supplement Healthy Investments for the Nest Egg (RISE &...

There is significant interest in reforming retirement plans for public school employees, particularly in light of current market conditions. This paper presents an overview of the various types of state regulation of public pension plans that affect possibilities for reform. Nearly all of the...

SECURE Act 2.0, which was enacted on December 29, 2022, represents a missed opportunity to enhance retirement equity. The Act’s 92 provisions provide small new tax incentives to those American workers struggling to save for a comfortable retirement, larger tax incentives to those with few...

Individual accounts have become a popular feature in Social Security reform proposals during the past several years. However, the precise meaning of "individual accounts" is unclear, as approaches vary greatly in their financing, management, and structure. Proposals differ in large part because...

This paper seeks to clarify the current debate surrounding individual accounts by exploring systematically the variety of structural and administrative arrangements that either have been proposed for individual account systems in this country or have been adopted in other parts of the world....

This paper shows that an uninsured fully-funded defined-benefit (DL) pension is effectively a defined-contribution (DC) pension invested in a special type of fixed-income security, one that imposes a large amount of diversifiable inflation risk on plan participants and that is apparently...