About 5 million state and local government workers, including 1.2 million public school teachers concentrated in 15 states, are not enrolled in Social Security. In order to ensure that those workers receive adequate benefits, Congress requires state and local government employers to offer...

Many public pension funds face serious funding shortfalls. In fact, more than half of the states currently have public pension funds with funded ratios that are less than 80 percent, a level many prefer. In this paper we examine factors important in explaining the funded ratios of state and...

We use 6 waves of the Bank of Italy's Survey on household income and wealth (SHIW) to check the evolution of workers' expectations on future pension benefits and retirement age from 2000 to 2012. Based on these two subjective evaluations, we compute a measure of expected pension benefit and...

This paper presents issues examined and discussed by participants at the Employee Benefit Research Institute's spring policy forum in Washington, DC, held May 5, 2005. EBRI President Dallas Salisbury said the forum was designed to pull together research that touched on the "total integration of...

Many nations incentivize retirement saving by letting workers defer taxes on pension contributions, imposing them when retirees withdraw their funds. Using a dynamic life cycle model, we show how 'Rothification' - that is, taxing 401(k) contributions rather than payouts - alters saving,...

Relationships between individual traits and savings decisions vary geographically. Understanding the structure of such relationships is interesting in general, but it is particularly important in the case of the Germany, where the pension reform of 2001 significantly decreased the level of...

This paper co-authored by Dr. Susan Mangiero, Dr. Israel Shaked, Mr. Brad Orelowitz, Attorney Jason Sheffield and Ms. Emilee Prebles looks at ERISA litigation statistics for cases filed between January 1, 2005 and August 31, 2008. All judicial opinions for these cases are tracked as part of...

Leverage ratios, the ratio of a firm's debt to equity or assets, is a frequently used measure of firm risk, utilized by firms, analysts, and investors. However, pension and other post-retirement benefits (OPRB) are largely ignored in determining a firm's total liabilities. Similarly, pension and...

This paper uses stochastic simulations on calibrated models to assess the steady state impact of different pension arrangements in an environment where financial markets are less than perfect. Surprisingly little is known about the optimal split between funded and unfunded systems when there are...

The Croatian system of old-age provision comprises a traditional public pay-as-you-go scheme and a mandatory funded scheme ("second pillar") that will provide increasing amounts of supplementary pensions to those entering retirement in the future. Due to the continuing economic crisis, the...