Recent defined benefit (DB) pension freezes in large healthy firms such as Verizon and IBM, as well as terminations of plans in the struggling steel and airline industries, highlight the fact that these traditional pensions cannot be viewed as risk-free promises from the employee's perspective....

Previous studies find a strong and positive empirical connection between health status and the share of risky assets held in household portfolios. But is this relationship truly causal, in the sense that households respond to changes in health by altering their portfolio allocation, or does it...

We examine the current wealth adequacy of older U.S. households using the 1998-2006 waves of the Health and Retirement Study (HRS). We find that the median older U.S. household is reasonably well situated, with a ratio of comprehensive net wealth to present value poverty- line wealth of about...

Defined benefit (DB) pension freezes in large healthy firms such as Verizon and IBM, as well as terminations of plans in the struggling steel and airline industries, highlight the fact that these traditional pensions cannot be viewed as risk-free promises from the employeeÂ’s perspective....

A fundamental element of the debate over Social Security reform is which set of principles should describe the role of the program over the next century. One possibility, which we refer to as "collectivist principles," emphasizes the economic efficiency gains that flow from a social insurance...

Even risky pension sponsors could offer essentially riskless pension promises by contributing a sufficient level of resources to their pension trust funds and by investing those resources in fixed–income securities designed to deliver their payoffs just as pension obligations are coming due....

The U.S. retirement system is often described as a three-legged stool in which the legs represent Social Security, employer pensions, and individual savings. This metaphor can be somewhat misleading, however, because it inaccurately suggests that the three sources of retirement income are...

The ultimate burden of a sales tax on intermediate products is traces to final consumers through input-output relationships. The main effect of accounting for the burden of taxes levied on intermediate products is to move the overall distributional effect of a sales tax more toward...

We show in a simple model that households will choose 401(k) loans over other consumer loans if the opportunity cost of 401(k) loans — i.e., the foregone asset returns — is less than the cost of other loans, and that few households would carry high-cost consumer debt without first utilizing...