The financial crisis and the ensuing Great Recession alerted those seeking to protect old-age security, about the extreme risks confronting the financial and political institutions comprising our retirement system. The workforce of today and tomorrow must count on longer lives and deferred retirement, while at the same time it is taking on increased responsibility for managing retirement risk. This volume explores new ways to think about, manage, and finance longevity risk, capital market risk, model risk, and regulatory risk. The book offers an in-depth analysis of the 'black swans' that threaten private and public pensions around the world such as capital market shocks, surprises to longevity, regulatory/political risk, and errors in modelling, will all have profound consequences for stakeholders ranging from pension plan participants, plan sponsors, policymakers, and those who seek to make retirement more resistant. This book analyzes such challenges to retirement sustainability, and it explores ways to better manage and finance them. Insights provided help build retirement systems capable of withstanding what the future will bring.

Recreating Sustainable Retirement: Resilience, Solvency, and Tail Risk (Pension Research Council Series)

Business & Money

Pension Reseach Council

Finance

Oxford University Press

This book highlights the importance of retirement security as a major policy concern of our time. A generation of "Baby Boomers" is on the verge of retirement, yet pension systems confront crushing challenges, and policymakers seek direction. The authors set their sights on employees' needs and expectations, employers' intentions and realizations, and policymakers' efforts to resolve the many challenges. Despite the fact that retirement systems face deep stresses exacerbated by volatile capital markets, poor corporate earning streams, weak macroeconomic performance, and international turmoil, nevertheless, contributors in this volume show courage and creativity in plotting the course over uneven terrain. In the book, three aspects of the evolution of risk and reward-sharing in retirement are evaluated, to offer guidance to pension fiduciaries, plan participants, and policymakers. First, the volume formulates new perspectives for assessing retirement risks and rewards. Second, it evaluates efforts to insure retirement plans. Third, it proposes several new strategies for managing retirement system risk. The volume will be especially useful for managers working toward more efficient pension plans; to scholars and policymakers seeking to maximize pension design effectiveness; and to actuaries and tax specialists concerned with pension regulation.

Restructuring Retirement Risks (Pension Research Council Series)

Economics

Latin American experiments with pension reform began when Chile converted its public pay-as-you-go system to a system of private individual accounts in 1981. In the 1990s, several other countries followed suit, inspired both by Chile's reforms and World Bank recommendations that stressed adopting compulsory government-mandated individual savings accounts. Following the lead of Latin America, individual accounts were subsequently introduced in a number of countries in both Europe and Asia. The World Bank and governments in the region have now begun to seriously re-evaluate these privatisations, with the most dramatic effort to 'reform the reform' coming from Chile, where President Michelle Bachelet backed a comprehensive initiative aimed at making the system more efficient and equitable. This volume is the first to assess pension reforms in this new 'post-privatization' era. Section 1 of the book begins with a discussion on demographic trends by Nobel laureate Robert W. Fogel and is followed by chapters on system design and their policy implications, including chapters on demographic trends, pension system default options, and an analysis of World Bank's policies and how they have evolved (by three former and current World Bank experts). This section concludes with two chapters with differing views on reform and the role of gender (an important and understudied topic). Section 2 contains in-depth chapters on major reform efforts in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Costa Rica, Brazil, Peru, Uruguay and Argentina. In addressing the most pressing policy issues and highlighting a broad range of country experiences, this volume provides an unparalleled account of the lessons from pension reform in the Americas.

Lessons from Pension Reform in the Americas (Pension Research Council Series)

As the leading edge of the "Baby Boom" generation attains age 60, members of this unusually large cohort born 1946-66 are poised to redefine retirement--just as they have restructured educational, housing, and labor markets in prior days. Looking ahead, their numbers and energy are sure to have a major impact on national pensions, healthcare, and social safety nets. Contributors to this volume note that "Boomers" will be better off than their predecessors in many ways, having benefited from the long run-up in housing prices, dramatic improvements in healthcare, and the expanding economy. On the other hand, the generation's sheer size will surely squeeze resources and require new approaches to retirement risk management. This book offers readers an invaluable and first book-length study of Boomers as they march into retirement. As such, it represents an invaluable addition to the Pension Research Council/Oxford University Press series. It will be especially useful for scholars and policymakers seeking to understand retirement preparedness, to actuaries and tax specialists concerned with retirement system regulation, and to plan sponsors interested in the determinants of work and retirement at older ages.

Redefining Retirement: How Will Boomers Fare? (Pension Research Council Series)

This book, the first in a new series produced by the Pension Research Council of the Wharton School in collaboration with Oxford University Press, explores ways to enhance retirement security in a volatile financial environment. The book begins by assessing the myriad retirement risks confronting employees, retirees, employers and governments. This book illustrates how stakeholders can reinvent pensions that perform will in a competitive global setting. Contributors then indicate how pension systems can be better designed to help protect against these risks. Of special interest is a discussion of new financial products and structures to meet and manage challenges to old-age security. Examples considered include pension investment guarantees and hedges, adapting catastrophe bonds to the pension context, and key regulatory draw important lessons for a wide range of countries, drawing from both developed and developing market experiences. Contributors include world-famous finance experts and risk management faculty, development economists, pension regulators and pension consultants.

The Pension Challenge: Risk Transfers and Retirement Income Security (Pension Research Council Series)

Employees are being given more and more decisions to make with regards to their pension and healthcare plans. Yet increasing research in the social sciences shows that the decisions 'real' people make are not those of the thoughtful and well-informed economic agent often portrayed in economic research, but are often based on flawed information and made without a full understanding of their financial implications. The contributors to Pension Design and Structure explore the assumptions behind commonly-held theories of retirement decision-making, and the consequences of the growing volume of research in behavioral finance and economics for the field of pension research. Using large datasets newly provided by financial service firms and real-world experiments, this volume tests the hypotheses of this research. This is the first book to explore the implications of behavioral finance research for pensions and retirement studies, and uses frontier research from several fields, including Finance, Economics, Management, Sociology, and Psychology. Contributors include leading pensions experts.

Pension Design and Structure: New Lessons from Behavioral Finance (Pension Research Council Series)

This book explores how rising pension and healthcare costs, along with workforce aging, are affecting pension and retirement planning around the world. Many middle-aged workers, now, realize that they will have to work longer than intended, as they begin to recognize that their retirement resources will be inadequate to finance retirement consumption. Volatile capital markets, rising medical-care costs, and low saving rates make retirement behavior and policy a moving target. Olivia Mitchell, executive director of The Pension Research Council at Wharton, and Robert L. Clark, Professor of Business Management and Economics at North Carolina State University, explore these themes with colleagues, touching on a diverse set of issues ranging from employment trends to pension accounting and investment, to retirement system overhaul. They illustrate how employers are actively reformulating the meaning of work and retirement, seeking to encourage more people to work longer than ever before, in

Reinventing the Retirement Paradigm (Pension Research Council Series)

For more than five decades, Fundamentals of Private Pensions has been the most authoritative text and reference book on retirement plans in the United States. The ninth edition is completely updated and reflects recent developments in retirement plans including the passage of the US Pension Protection Act of 2006 (PPA), the widespread shift toward hybrid and defined contribution plans, and a burgeoning economics and finance research literature on retirement and retirement plans. The volume is organized into eight main sections so the reader may use the volume as a text, a research tool, or a general reference. Section I (Chapter 1) introduces the historical evolution of the pension movement and the underlying forces that shaped its progress. Section II (Chapters 2 and 3) explains how employer-provided pensions fit into the patchwork of the U.S. retirement income security system, especially Social Security. The section also includes a discussion of the economics of tax incentives and their effect on retirement plan offerings and the structure of the benefits provided. Section III (Chapters 4 through 9) lays out the economic role of retirement plans--their design, workforce incentives, plan finances, production of adequate retirement income, possibilities for phased retirement, and the risk of outliving pension assets. Section IV (Chapters 10 through 13) examines the various forms of defined benefit and defined contribution plans, including hybrid plans, in terms of their structure, requirements, and operations. Section V (Chapters 14 through 20) lays out the regulatory environment in which plans operate; this extensive material has been especially updated to reflect PPA, and the reams of associated guidance and implementing regulations. Section VI (Chapters 21 through 25) explores the funding and accounting rules under which private defined benefit plans operate; this section also reflects the new PPA rules. The penultimate section (Chapters 26 through 28) includes a complete revamping of chapters on risk management and investments applicable to retirement plans. The section describes modern portfolio theory and its broad implications for retirement investing, and in two separate chapters, specific implications for defined benefit and defined contribution plans. The final section (Chapter 29) concludes the text with a discussion of the future of retirement plans in the United States and around the world--a particularly timely subject in light of the extreme financial volatility experienced in 2008 and the pending retirement of the baby boom generation.

Fundamentals of Private Pensions

Investing

As Baby Boomers make the transition into their 60s, they have focused policymakers and the media's attention onto how this generation will manage the retirement phase of its lifetime. This volume acknowledges that many, though not all, in this older cohort have accumulated substantial assets, so for them, the question is what will they do with what they have? We offer a detailed exploration of how people entering retirement will deploy their accumulated assets in the near and long term, so to best meet their myriad spending, investment, and other objectives. The book offers readers an invaluable study of emerging issues regarding assets and expectations on the verge of retirement, including uncertainty regarding life expectancy and morbidity. It is composed of chapters from a distinguished set of authors including a Nobel Laureate and a wonderful mix of academics and practitioners from the legal, financial, and economic fields. This volume represents an invaluable addition to the Pensi

Recalibrating Retirement Spending and Saving (Pension Research Council Series)

Personal Finance

People covered by public pensions are often the subject of 'pension envy:' that is, their benefits might seem more generous and their contributions lower than those offered by the private sector. Yet this book points out that such judgments are often inaccurate, since civil servants hold jobs with few counterparts in private industry, such as firefighters, police, judges, and teachers. Often these are riskier, dirtier, and demand more loyalty and discretion than would be required of a more mobile labor force in the private sector. The debate challenges traditional ideas about how the public employee labor contract is structured and raises questions about how such employees are attracted to the public sector, retained and motivated on the job, and retired, via an entire compensation package of wages and benefits. Authors explore aspects of these schemes, addressing the cost and valuation debate, along with the political economy of how public pension asset pools are perceived and managed

The Future of Public Employee Retirement Systems (Pension Research Council Series)

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