The National Retirement Risk Index has shown that even if households work to age 65 and annuitize all their financial assets, including the receipts from reverse mortgages on their homes, 44 percent will be 'at risk' of being unable to maintain their standard of living in retirement. More...

The general perception is that the Social Security program expanded significantly in the 1970s and today benefits are much higher relative to pre-retirement earnings than they were prior to that expansion. Indeed, the Social Security Trustees Report shows that the replacement rate benefits as a...

House prices rose 60 percent between 2000 and 2007 before the housing bubble burst. The question is whether the housing boom made people better or worse prepared for retirement. Theory says that infinitely-lived households experience no increase in their real net worth when housing prices...

Investigates the prospects for moving the average retirement age to 66 from 63. Examines companies' incentives to employ older workers and what government can do to promote continued participation in the workforce. Considers the challenge of ensuring a secure retirement for low-wage workers and...

Pension reform is a key policy challenge in Russia. This paper examines how pension spending could increase in Russia in the absence of reforms, quantifies the impact of some recent proposals, and suggests some alternatives that would ensure public pension benefits - relative to wages - not fall...

Automatic adjustment mechanisms (AAMs)-rules ensuring that certain characteristics of a pension system respond to demographic, macroeconomic and financial developments, in a predetermined fashion and without the need for additional intervention-have been introduced in many OECD countries to...

We use a historical experiment to test whether U.S. corporate defined benefit pension plans strategically use regulatory freedom to lower the reported value of pension liabilities, and hence required cash contributions. For some years, pension plans were required to estimate two liabilities -...

We use the 1998-2006 waves of the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) to investigate how households change their asset holdings at older ages. We find a notable increase in the net worth of older households between 1998 and 2006, with most of the growth due to housing. Our results indicate that,...

This SDN explores how demographic changes have affected and will affect public and private sector savings, highlighting the interaction between pension systems, labor markets, and demographic variables