Pension Research Council Publications – serie

A text that quantifies and provides new or improved actuarial notation for long recognized pension cost concepts and procedures and, in certain areas, develops new insights and techniques. With the exception of the first few chapters, the text is a virtual rewrite of the first edition of 1977. Among the major additions are chapters on statutory funding requirements, pension accounting, funding policy analysis, asset allocation, and retiree health benefits.

As the United States comes to terms with the pending insolvency of social security, workers are increasingly pinning their hopes for retirement adequacy on employer-sponsored plans. Positioning Pensions for the Twenty-First Century analyzes the role of pensions in retirement security, examining how these programs will evolve to meet the challenges to our nation's retirement system.The book brings together a team of leading economists, corporate and labor specialists, actuaries, and policy experts to examine the future of retirement options within the context of emerging labor and business trends and innovative developments in the pension community. They show how a successful public and private pension system can be sustained and strengthened and demonstrate how employer pensions can be configured against a delicately financed social insurance system.The book's contributions examine where pensions have succeeded and failed over the last several decades and point to positive new developments in the pension arena. Its coverage includes innovative pension options such as hybrid and cash-balance plans; pension funding regulations; changes in GATT laws altering pension insurance premiums; and emerging developments concerning administrative costs and pension obligation bonds. It also features new research on defined contribution plan investment options and includes three case studies of participant-directed pension investments, telling how thousands of workers are allocating their pension savings in 401(k) and related plans.Positioning Pensions for the Twenty-First Century is essential reading for all managers, employees, and policymakers concerned with designing pension systems that can withstand the challenges of the next decade.

The United States social security system is the nation's largest social insurance program. As such, it has a far-reaching impact throughout the economy, influencing not only old-age economic security but also many behaviors, including corporate employment policy, retirement patterns, and personal saving. In the past, the system's universal coverage and generous benefits ensured popular support to a degree enjoyed by no other form of "big government" social spending.Yet over two-thirds of all Americans today believe that the social security system will face bankruptcy by the time they retire. The question of social security reform-how to reform the system or whether the system needs reform at all-is the subject of heated debate at all levels of government, in the media, and among workers, pensioners, and employers.Prospects for Social Security Reform informs the debate by exploring why the system is at a crossroads today and what to do about it. Contributors detail the size and nature of the problem, explain views of key "stakeholders" regarding reform options, and report new evidence on how reform might affect the economy. Research findings and public opinion polls are analyzed, as are lessons from other countries experimenting with new ways to deliver old-age benefit promises.No other volume includes as diverse and expert a set of perspectives on reform and privatization as those gathered here from economists, actuaries, employers, investment managers, and representatives of organized labor. Among its chapters is the path-breaking study "Social Security Money's Worth," the 1999 winner of the TIAA-CREF's Paul A. Samuelson Award for Outstanding Scholarly Writing on Lifelong Financial Security.

Colleges and universities across the country face huge challenges as their faculties age, their budgets stagnate, and mandatory retirement becomes a thing of the past. In To Retire or Not? the nation's foremost authorities on retirement policy and practice provide a critical assessment of academic labor markets and retirement patterns, explaining how to adjust pension and other incentive programs to ensure proper replenishment of intellectual and human capital. Case studies vividly illustrate how to predict the need for special retirement programs, how to structure voluntary early-out benefit plans, and how age-based retirement incentives work in practice. Recent legal decisions are assessed and critiqued.A recent amendment to the U.S. Age Discrimination in Employment Act ended mandatory retirement for tenured faculty at colleges and universities across the country. This law let individual faculty members enjoy an economic benefit enjoyed by almost all other American workers: they could choose to continue working past age 70 or "sell" the benefit back to their universities in exchange for earlier retirement. At the same time, however, educational administrators were faced with a faculty bulge created by the expansion of the professorate in the 1960s and early '70s, and the so-called "surplus army" of Ph.D.s of the 1980s. Colleges and universities everywhere are now faced with the higher costs of retaining senior professors instead of hiring entry-level replacements at lower salaries.

Some 13 million public-sector workers in the United States-including teachers, police and firefighters, state and municipal employees, judges, and legislators-and another six million federal and military employees participate in government pension plans. These pension systems are extraordinarily diverse in design, investment policy, and governance, and they face substantial challenges as the government-sector workforce ages and governments are asked to take on new and different tasks.Public employee pensions are in deep trouble in many countries, undermining economic policy and threatening retiree well being. What can be done to help these programs perform more efficiently and enhance old-age security? From the Pension Research Council of the Wharton School, this volume takes stock of public pension developments in the US and Canada, highlighting challenges these financial institutions face in coming decades. The first Pension Research Council study of public pensions in a quarter of a century tackles these topics with an impressive team of international actuarial, legal, and economic experts.

Understanding the historical development of pensions is critical to the future of retirement systems around the world. A History of Public Sector Pensions in the United States offers a comprehensive assessment of the political and financial dimensions of public sector pensions from the colonial period until the emergence of modern retirement plans in the twentieth century. The authors emphasize how retirement plans can help achieve human resource objectives, how public sector pension policy has sometimes been influenced by other government objectives, and how early pension plans were funded.After discussing the economics of retirement plans, A History of Public Sector Pensions in the United States reviews the history of European retirement plans, beginning with their use in the Roman Empire, and then moves on to early American pension systems. The authors explore the development and management of U.S. army and navy pension plans during the nineteenth century, drawing on original records of participants, retirees, and plan finances. They document the struggle to establish a federal civil service retirement system and trace the growth of state and local retirement plans. This history is inextricably linked to broader developments in U.S. financial markets, offering rich insights into political debates, including current debates surrounding plan design and plan funding.A History of Public Sector Pensions in the United States will be of significant interest to financial market and pension experts, labor and corporate pension sponsors, policymakers, public sector plan participants, and others who want to know how and why pensions emerged.