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. Indeed,...

We examine 401(k) borrowing since 1992 and identify a puzzle: despite potential gains from borrowing against 401(k) assets instead of from other sources, most eligible households eschew 401(k) loans, including many who carry relatively expensive balances on credit cards and auto loans. We...

We construct two measures of the current wealth adequacy of older U.S. households using the 1998-2006 waves of the Health and Retirement Study (HRS). The first is the ratio of comprehensive wealth - defined as net worth plus the expected value of future income streams - to the wealth that would...

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....

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....

This paper establishes a causal relation between an individual's decision of whether to own stocks and average stock market participation decision of the individual's community. We instrument for the average ownership of an individual's community with lagged average ownership of the states in...

This paper provides direct evidence of a causal link between the stock market participation of individuals and that of the other members of the community in which they reside. We first establish the presence of a robust positive correlation between the probability that an individual owns stock...

This paper is the first to investigate the importance of geography in explaining equity market participation. We provide evidence to support two distinct local area effects. The first is a community ownership effect, that is, individuals are influenced by the investment behavior of members of...

Dramatic structural changes in the U.S. pension system, along with the impending wave of retiring baby boomers, have given rise to a broad policy discussion of the adequacy of household retirement wealth. We construct a uniquely comprehensive measure of wealth for households aged 51 and older in...

The approaching retirement of the baby boomers, accelerating trend from DB to DC pension plans, and growing uncertainty over the solvency of Social Security all raise important questions about the ability of households to finance their retirement years with liquid assets, rather than annuities....