February 2018

19Feb

US. Spending Bill Sets Path to Fix a Looming Pension Crisis

The sprawling agreement to boost government spending reached by Republicans and Democrats this month quietly included a step toward defusing what could be a financial time bomb for 1.5 million retirees and hundreds of companies in the industrial Midwest and the South. The deal creates a select congressional committee to craft what could effectively be a federal rescue of as many as 200 so-called “multiemployer” pension plans — in which employers and labor unions band together to provide retirement benefits...

February 19, 2018
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16Feb

US. State Pensions Need Reforms, Not Fewer Options

Across the country, state and local pension systems have not amassed enough assets (stocks, bonds, and other financial investments) to cover the retirement benefits promised to current and retired state and local employees. This gap is referred to as the pension funds’ “unfunded liabilities”. According to the Pew Charitable Trusts, the unfunded liabilities of state-administered pension systems across the country were $1.1 trillion in 2015 – a 17 percent increase from 2014! According to the American Legislative Exchange Council, the...

February 16, 2018
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05Feb

A Framework for Analyzing Defined Benefit Pension Insurance: The Survivor Benefit Plan for Veterans

By William W. Jennings (U.S. Air Force Academy - Department of Management), Jeff Merrell (University of Colorado at Boulder - Leeds School of Business) Thomas O'Malley (U.S. Air Force Academy - Department of Management) & Brian Payne (US Air Force Academy) Millions of defined benefit pensioners must select a pension insurance method. We present a framework for making this decision within the context of US military veterans’ Survivor Benefit Plan (SBP). Federal government subsidies generate a positive expected net payout...

February 5, 2018
Articles, Pension design, Regulation, , ,
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02Feb

US. As Super Bowl approaches, NFL pension plan still underfunded

As fans everywhere prepare to sit down with bowls of chili and platters of wings to watch the Super Bowl, they might be interested to know that pro football players could be facing some of the same pension problems their fans are: the NFL Players’ Pension Plan is only 73 percent funded, according to an analysis from the Society of Actuaries. That’s based on data from 2015, the most recent year for which data is publicly available, and it is an improvement...

February 2, 2018
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January 2018

31Jan

US. Empower Retirement Releases Real-Time Plan Design Platform

Empower Retirement has released its PlanVisualizer technology offering, a Monte Carlo-based simulator that allows 401k advisors to modify key variables in plan design to illustrate their effects in real time. Available through the broader retirement advisor market, PlanVisualizer provides plan sponsors “with a multi-dimensional, holistic view of their retirement plan in its current state, along with the ability to model how changes to key design elements can potentially affect participant preparedness.” It’s particularly timely, according to Peter Kapinos, head of advisor,...

January 31, 2018
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31Jan

On a better savings course: US retirement score rises

Americans' retirement savings are in the best shape they've been in more than a decade. So says a survey by Fidelity Investments, which looked at more than 3,000 working households that have started saving for retirement. After tallying up how much they're saving in their 401(k) accounts, their expected Social Security benefits and other assets, Fidelity said that the typical saver is on track to have 80 percent of the income they'll need to cover retirement costs. That's the highest score...

January 31, 2018
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29Jan

Understanding Earnings, Labor Supply, and Retirement Decisions

By Xiaodong Fan (University of New South Wales (UNSW)), Ananth Seshadri (University of Wisconsin - Madison - Department of Economics) & Christopher Taber (National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER); University of Wisconsin - Madison) We develop and estimate a model in which individuals make decisions on consumption, human capital investment, labor supply, and retirement. Unlike all previous work, our model allows both an endogenous wage process (which is typically assumed exogenous in the human capital and earnings dynamics literature). In...

January 29, 2018
Aging, Articles, Labor Market, , ,
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29Jan

Work-Life Balance and Labor Force Attachment at Older Ages

By Marco Angrisani (Center for Economic and Social Research (CESR)), Maria Casanova (University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) - Department of Economics) & Erik Meijer (University of Southern California; RAND Corporation) We use data from the Health and Retirement Study to examine the role of work-life balance (WLB) as a nonmonetary determinant of retirement transitions, conditional on job attributes such as hours of work, compensation and benefits. We show that low levels of WLB are significantly associated with subsequent reductions...

January 29, 2018
Aging, Articles, Labor Market, Slider-Left, ,
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22Jan

The Devil You Know: A Survey Examining How Retail Investors Seek Out and Use Financial Information and Investment Advice

By Christine Sgarlata Chung (Albany Law School) Everyday, people across the United States make decisions that will affect their financial futures — e.g., borrowing money to buy a house, go to college, or start a business; investing in the stock market to save for retirement; using check cashing services or payday lenders rather than accounts at banks or credit unions for day-to-day banking needs, and the like. Traditional tenets of financial economics and investment theory assume that people make fully...

January 22, 2018
Articles, Investing, Labor Market, Savings, , , ,
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15Jan

A Look into the United States’ Underfunded Pension System

By Jason Lin (Truman State University - Department of Business Administration) & Jane Sung (Truman State University) The public pension crisis has come under increasing scrutiny over the past decade as shifting demographic trends, harsh economic conditions and the very nature of pension funds have changed, and not for the better. Pension funds create valuable saving and investment tools for an individual's retirement. They make what seems like the impossible daunting task of saving sufficient funds for retirement completely feasible....

January 15, 2018
Articles, Pension design, Regulation, System Sustainability, , ,
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