The investment practices of public pension funds have become a topic of major interest in the wake of President Clinton's 1999 proposal to invest a portion of the Social Security Trust Funds in equities. Both supporters and opponents of the proposal point to the performance of public plans to...

The Trustees of the Social Security system have just issued the 2008 projections for the system over the next 75 years. The report contains two surprises. First, the 75-year deficit dropped to 1.70 percent of taxable payrolls from the roughly 2 percent it has been for the last 14 years. The...

Most of the discussion of retirement security focuses on declining Social Security replacement rates, modest 401(k) balances, the low level of saving, and longer life expectancy. Rising health care costs, which seem too amorphous to incorporate into numerical examples, are often characterized as...

Social investing is a movement that advocates incorporating social and environmental considerations, as well as financial factors, when making investment decisions. The most recent incarnation of this movement is the initiative by state legislatures to force public pension funds to sell their...

The economic status of older Americans has improved tremendously during the last 50 years. Today the old-age poverty rate is about one third of its mid-20th century level, and poverty among the elderly is roughly the same as that among the non-elderly. Poverty rates for older non-married women,...

As recently as the mid-1960s, the median retirement age for men - the age at which half of all men are no longer in the labor force - was 66. Today, it is 63. But given the scheduled decline in Social Security replacement rates, increased longevity, and the relatively low balances in 401(k)...

The Center's National Retirement Risk Index (NRRI) provides a measure of the percentage of households that will be unable to maintain their standard of living in retirement. Issued in June 2006 with numbers based on the 2004 Federal Reserve's Survey of Consumer Finances, the Index shows that 43...

In June 2006, the Center for Retirement Research released the National Retirement Risk Index (NRRI). The results showed that even if households work to age 65 and annuitize all their financial assets, including the receipts from reverse mortgages on their homes, 43 percent will be at risk of...

The Trustees of the Social Security system have just issued the 2007 report. The report includes projections for the system over the next 75 years, prepared by the Social Security's Office of the Actuary. The bottom line is that the long-run outlook has remained virtually unchanged for the last...

The investment practices of public pension funds have become a topic of major interest in the wake of President Clinton's 1999 proposal to invest a portion of the Social Security Trust Funds in equities. Both supporters and opponents of the proposal point to the performance of public plans to...