Description: This paper examines how income sources change when married women in Britain, the U.S., and Germany are widowed, and it draws inferences about the income consequences of specific retirement and survivorship provisions. .

Description: Graphs mortality experience over the prior 15 years, show possible trends over the prior 80 years, discusses the impact on liabilities and funding of the New York public retirement system based on projections of life expectancy, and discusses the possible factors that have affected mortality.

Description: This is the panel transcript for the 2017 LT100 Symposium Session 2C: Impact of Aging: What Can Individuals and the Private Sector Do to Address Challenges?

Description: The article presents a number of approaches to communicating and discussing risk with employer and retirement board members.

Description: Part 2 proposes solutions to the second of three flaws of the current financial model to obtaining the fair value of the public sector employer’s pension benefit liability.

Description: Paper presents two alternative practices that could promote fuller recognition of a plan’s investment risks and that take into account the long-term nature of the benefit promises of maturing retirement systems.

Description: Presented at Living to 100 symposium, January 2002. This paper presents data on the mortality, and mortality improvement trends, for retired U.S. Civil Service employees and their survivors, and analyzes the relationship to such factors as: Indexed final salary, Amount of indexed annuity, Total service at retirement, Duration on the Annuity Rolls, Retiree vs. beneficiary, Disability vs. non-disability.

Description: Defined benefit DB pension plans continue to dominate the retirement landscape for the roughly 20 million state and local government workers in the United States. In most state and local plans, pension benefits are protected by constitutional, statutory, or common law guarantees. In many cases, these guarantees make the benefit promises to participants virtually free of risk. Finance theory is unambiguous that the discount rate used to value future pension obligations should reflect the riskiness of the liabilities.

Description: The purpose of this paper is to explore a methodology for choosing among techniques for managing contribution volatility in defined- benefit pension plans. A frequently used – and as often criticized – method for managing contribution volatility is to base actuarial cost on smoothed assets. Our goal in this paper is to develop a methodology for measuring and evaluating the quantitative impact of competing asset smoothing policies. We proceed by investigating a series of basic pension metrics, evaluating the characteristics of each using a simulated pension plan. We then use normalized and weighted combinations of these metrics to determine an optimal smoothing policy.

Description: Paper examines some of the underlying issues associated with public pension plan benefits and financing. It reviews concerns related to intergenerational equity and problems in maintaining the funded status of public DB retirement plans.