Today, the Social Security Administration announced that benefits payable in December 2008 would be increased 5.8 percent beginning January 1, 2009. This cost-of-living-adjustment (COLA) – the largest in 26 years – is an important reminder that keeping pace with inflation is one of the...

The difference in labor force participation rates of men aged 55-64 across the United States is astounding. For example, West Virginia has a participation rate below 60 percent, while South Dakota has a participation rate approaching 90 percent (see Figure 1). This fact in itself has significant...

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. If they extracted the equity from their home through some form of housing-related debt and consumed all their...

This paper uses the first six waves of the Health and Retirement Study to investigate the impact of pensions on expected retirement age, on the probability of being retired in each wave given employment in the previous wave, and on the probability of retiring earlier than planned. Pension...

Financial advice tends to focus on financial assets, but other levers may be more important for most households. This paper proceeds in three stages. The first section reports a simple Excel spreadsheet exercise that provides a stylized example of the tradeoff between returns and time spent in...

A widespread perception is that state-local government workers receive high pension benefits which, combined with Social Security, provide more than adequate retirement income. This study uses the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) and actuarial reports to test this hypothesis. The major finding...

In 2010, the U.S. Department of Labor proposed changes that would eliminate third-party incentive payments, such as 12b-1 fees, that may encourage broker-dealers to sell high-fee mutual funds to Individual Retirement Account (IRA) customers. The investment industry argues that eliminating these...

The brief’s key findings are: *The Federal Reserve’s 2013 Survey of Consumer Finances provides an opportunity to examine trends in retirement savings over the past few years. *The good news is increased use of target date funds; the bad news is no improvement in participation rates,...

Employer defined benefit pension plans have long been an important component of the U.S. retirement system. Although these plans are disappearing in the private sector – replaced by 401(k)s – they remain the prevalent retirement plan arrangement in the public sector. But these public sector...

The comparability of state-local versus private sector pay has become a major issue in the wake of the financial crisis. Funded levels of public pension plans declined sharply, and governments' ability to make the required contributions has been severely constrained by the collapse of...