Administration of defined contribution retirement plans is generally outsourced by plan sponsors to third-party financial institutions, resulting in two primary types of plan fees. While investment fund fees in defined contribution plans have been heavily scrutinized, the administrative fees...

Collectively, Americans are woefully unprepared financially for retirement. This retirement problem actually reflects a collection of diverse issues. This paper identifies the most important ones: longevity; access; contributions; portability; behavioral mistakes; funded status; expenses; and...

In September 2020, Robert Powell, editor-in-chief of the Retirement Management Journal, Jason Fichtner, PhD, senior lecturer at the Johns Hopkins University; and Anna Rappaport, FSA, MAAA, chair of the Society of Actuaries Committee on Post-Retirement Needs and Risks, spoke with Mitchell about...

Robert Powell, Retirement Management Journal editor-in-chief; David John, a nonresident senior fellow in economic studies at Brookings and a senior strategic policy advisor at the AARP Public Policy Institute focusing on pension and retirement savings issues; and Nevin Adams, then chief content...

Dr. Brown shares his thoughts on how the defined contribution system could leverage its resources and expertise to provide a new tool for managing the key risks in retirement – longevity, medical expenditures and inflation – with a holistic Retirement Security Product (RSP)

The purpose of this study is twofold. On one hand we derive an optimal allocation framework between stocks and bonds, with and without a momentum factor, taking into account a regime-switching model based on monthly equity and interest rate data since 1870. On the other, we investigate the...

Previous EBRI research reported on a comparative analysis of future benefits from private-sector, voluntary enrollment (VE) 401(k) plans and stylized, final-average-pay defined benefit (DB) plans. This paper expands upon work previously published by computing for a number of simulated employee...

A rapidly growing public policy concern facing the United States is whether future generations of retired Americans, particularly those in the Baby Boomer and Gen X cohorts, will have adequate retirement incomes. There have been several policy studies in recent years that suggest that the...

We show that incorporating defined benefit pension funds in an asset pricing model with incomplete markets improves its ability to jointly match the historical equity premium and riskless rate, and has important implications for risk sharing. We emphasize the importance of the pension fund's...