Defined benefit plans in the private sector are on the decline. And the early 21st century produced an uptick in the pace of decline driven by the financially devastating impact of the ‘perfect storm’ of plummeting stock prices and low interest rates, legislation that will require...

While Social Security’s Normal Retirement Age (NRA) is increasing to 67, the Earliest Eligibility Age (EEA) remains at 62. Similar plans to increase the EEA raise concerns that they would create excessive hardship on workers that are worn-out or in bad health. One simple rule to increase the...

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...

Life-cycle funds offer an intuitive approach to retirement investing. Despite their intuitive appeal, the empirical and theoretical support for life-cycle funds is mixed. We examine life-cycle funds using dynamic optimization techniques to evaluate the optimal asset allocation over the life...

Many accounts of pension politics assign primary importance to societal forces. In the well-known formulation, pensions are the “third rail” of politics: politicians cannot cut benefits without suffering electoral retribution. In addition, some see the preferences of business as a key...

Using data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), we calculate the relationship between socio-economic status and a utility based measure of annuity value. We find considerable variation between groups once we take account of not only socio-economic differences in mortality, but also...

Over the past two decades, coverage under employer-sponsored pension plans has shifted from traditional defined benefit to 401(k)-type defined contribution formats. This shift has many important implications for retirement security. This brief examines the differential impact of the transition...

The economic status of older Americans has improved dramatically since 1960. Today, the poverty rate for those 65 and over is about the same as for those aged 18-64. But substantial pockets of poverty remain, especially among older non-married women. This brief will focus on why older women are...

The Trustees of the Social Security system have just issued the 2005 report. The projections used in this report are prepared by Social Security's Office of the Actuary. The Report projects the system's financial outlook under three sets of cost assumptions - high, low and intermediate. This...

The employer match of employee contributions is an important characteristic of 401(k) plans. The match was designed to encourage participation and contributions ñ particularly by lower-paid employees. However, at many companies, the employer match became a casualty of the financial collapse and...