Public pension funding has recently become a front-burner policy issue in the wake of the financial crisis and given the pending retirement of large numbers of baby boomers. This paper examines the current funding of state and local pensions using a sample of 126 plans, estimating an aggregate...

States and localities account for pensions in their financial statements according to standards laid out by the Governmental Accounting Standards Board (GASB). Under these standards, state and local plans generally follow an actuarial model and discount their liabilities by the long-term yield...

Federal law allows certain state and local governments to exclude employees from Social Security coverage if the employees are provided with a sufficiently generous pension. Approximately 6.5 million such workers were not covered by Social Security in 2018. Retirement systems for non-covered...

Social Security is designed to serve as the base of retirement support, to be supplemented by employer-sponsored plans. However, approximately one-quarter of state and local government employees – currently, around 5 million workers annually – are not covered by Social Security on their...

Public sector defined benefit pension plans are based on final earnings. As such, these plans are back-loaded; those with long careers receive substantial benefits and those who leave early receive little. The analysis consists of three parts. The first section discusses the design of state and...

The financial crisis reduced the value of equities in state and local defined benefit pensions and hurt the funding status of these plans. The impact will become evident only over time, however, because actuaries in the public sector tend to smooth both gains and losses, typically over a...