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From the Wharton School, offering 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.
For anyone with an interest in pensions—workers and employers, personnel directors, accountants, actuaries, lawyers, insurance agents, financial analysts, government officials, and social scientists—this book is required reading. Now, without the aid of a pension specialist, anyone can determine how their particular pension plan stacks up against the average. Using virtually all available government sources (including computerized data unavailable in print) and their own extensive surveys, the authors present a comprehensive description of the structural features and financial conditions of U.S. private, state, city, and municipal pension plans. The introductions to the hundreds of tables explain and highlight the information. The picture that emerges of the "typical" plan and its significant variations is crucial to all those with a financial stake in pensions. The reader can compare pension vesting, retirement, and benefit provisions by plan type, plan size, industry, union status, and many more characteristics. With this information, workers can evaluate just how generous their employer is; job applicants can compare fringe benefits of prospective employers; personnel directors can judge their competitive edge. The financial community will find especially interesting the analysis of the unfunded liabilities of private, state, and local pension funds. The investment decisions of private and public pension funds and their return performances are described as well. Government officials and social scientists will find the analysis of pension coverage, the receipt of pension income by the elderly, cost-of-living adjustments, and disability insurance of special importance in evaluating the proper degree of public intervention in the area of old age income support. Pensions in the American Economy is comprehensive and easy to use. Every reader, from small-business owners and civil servants to pension fund specialists, will find in it essential information about this increasingly important part of labor compensation and retirement finances.
This book examines the major economic challenges associated with the sustainability of public pensions, specifically demographic change, labor-market relations, and risk sharing. The issue of public pensions occupies the political and economic agendas of many major governments in the world. International organizations such as the World Bank and the OECD warn that the economic changes driven by an aging society negatively affects the sustainability of pension systems. This book analyzes different global public pension systems to offer policies, methods and tools for sustainable public pensions. Real case studies from France, Sweden, Latin America, Algeria, USA and Mexico are featured.
In the wake of the financial crisis and Great Recession, the health of state and local pension plans has emerged as a front burner policy issue. Elected officials, academic experts, and the media alike have pointed to funding shortfalls with alarm, expressing concern that pension promises are unsustainable or will squeeze out other pressing government priorities. A few local governments have even filed for bankruptcy, with pensions cited as a major cause. Alicia H. Munnell draws on both her practical experience and her research to provide a broad perspective on the challenge of state and local pensions. She shows that the story is big and complicated and cannot be viewed through a narrow prism such as accounting methods or the role of unions. By examining the diversity of the public plan universe, Munnell debunks the notion that all plans are in trouble. In fact, she finds that while a few plans are basket cases, many are functioning reasonably well. Munnell's analysis concludes that the plans in serious trouble need a major overhaul. But even the relatively healthy plans face three challenges ahead: an excessive concentration of plan assets in equities; the risk that steep benefit cuts for new hires will harm workforce quality; and the constraints plans face in adjusting future benefits for current employees. Here, Munnell proposes solutions that preserve the main strengths of state and local pensions while promoting needed reforms.
The 2019 edition of Pensions at a Glance highlights the pension reforms undertaken by OECD countries over the last two years. Moreover, two special chapters focus on non-standard work and pensions in OECD countries, take stock of different approaches to organising pensions for non-standard workers in the OECD, discuss why non-standard work raises pension issues and suggest how pension settings could be improved.
The fraction of the population over age sixty-five in many developed countries is projected to rise, in some cases sharply, in coming decades. This has drawn growing interest to research on the health and economic circumstances of individuals as they age. Many individuals are retiring from paid work, yet they are living longer than ever. Their well-being is shaped by their past decisions such as their saving behavior, as well as by current and future economic conditions, health status, medical innovations, and a rapidly evolving landscape of policy incentives and supports. The contributions to Insights in the Economics of Aging uncover how financial, physical, and emotional well-being are integrally related. The authors consider the interactions between financial circumstances in later life, such as household savings and home ownership, physical circumstances such as health and disability, and emotional well-being, including happiness and mental health.
The Latin America and Caribbean (LAC) region has reduced its inequality and poverty, and is looking towards the future with greater optimism than in the past. As the region grows, new problems appear that economic policymakers must address. How to provide adequate pensions for the elderly is one such problem. This book offers an analysis of pension systems from the perspective of the functioning of the regions labor markets. It clarifies why, more than half a century after pension systems were created, only a minority of workers in the region save for their pension in the contributory systems through payroll taxes. The study points out that the problem lies not only in the lack of coverage, but also in the low level of benefits, even of contributory pensions. It argues that to design public policies for pensions, it is essential to understand the complex web of interactions between employers and workers that take place in the labor market.
From the Pension Research Council of the Wharton School, this book explores the diversity of governmental pension plans and investigates how these financial institutions must change in years to come.
Why has old-age security become less solidaristic and increasingly tied to risky capitalist markets? Drawing on rich archival data that covers more than fifty years of American history, Michael A. McCarthy argues that the critical driver was policymakers' reactions to capitalist crises and their political imperative to promote capitalist growth.Pension development has followed three paths of marketization in America since the New Deal, each distinct but converging: occupational pension plans were adopted as an alternative to real increases in Social Security benefits after World War II, private pension assets were then financialized and invested into the stock market, and, since the 1970s, traditional pension plans have come to be replaced with riskier 401(k) retirement plans. Comparing each episode of change, Dismantling Solidarity mounts a forceful challenge to common understandings of America’s private pension system and offers an alternative political economy of the welfare state. McCarthy weaves together a theoretical framework that helps to explain pension marketization with structural mechanisms that push policymakers to intervene to promote capitalist growth and avoid capitalist crises and contingent historical factors that both drive them to intervene in the particular ways they do and shape how their interventions bear on welfare change. By emphasizing the capitalist context in which policymaking occurs, McCarthy turns our attention to the structural factors that drive policy change. Dismantling Solidarity is both theoretically and historically detailed and superbly argued, urging the reader to reconsider how capitalism itself constrains policymaking. It will be of interest to sociologists, political scientists, historians, and those curious about the relationship between capitalism and democracy.
Pensions in the U.S. Economy is the fourth in a series on pensions from the National Bureau of Economic Research. For both economists and policymakers, this volume makes a valuable contribution to current research on pensions and the economics of the elderly. The contributors report on retirement saving of individuals and the saving that results from corporate funding of pension plans, and they examine particular aspects of the plans themselves from the employee's point of view. Steven F. Venti and David A. Wise offer a careful analysis of who contributes to IRAs and why. Benjamin M. Friedman and Mark Warshawsky look at the reasons more retirement saving is not used to purchase annuities. Personal saving through pension contribution is discussed by B. Douglas Bernheim and John B. Shoven in the context of recent government and corporate pension funding changes. Michael J. Boskin and John B. Shoven analyze indicators of the economic well-being of the elderly, addressing the problem of why a large fraction of the elderly remain poor despite a general improvement in the economic status of the group as a whole. The relative merits of defined contribution versus defined benefit plans, with emphasis on the risk aspects of the two types of plans for the individual, are examined by Zvi Bodie, Alan J. Marcus, and Robert C. Merton. In the final paper, pension plans and worker turnover are the focus of the discussion by Edward P. Lazear and Robert L. Moore, who propose pension option value rather than the commonly used accrued pension wealth as a measure of pension value.