Description: A common approach to estimating the total amount of savings required to fund retirement is to first apply a generic “replacement rate” to pre-retirement income, such as 80%, to get the desired retirement income need. That need is then assumed to increase annually at the rate of inflation for the duration of retirement, which is generally assumed to be some fixed period, such as 30 years. Using government data along with a fairly simple market and mortality model, we explore these assumptions to more accurately estimate the true cost of retirement

Description: This paper examines the history and current problems of the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation PBGC. From The Future of Pension Plan Funding and Disclosure Monograph, M-RS05-1.

Description: Expert discussion of several previous papers. From The Future of Pension Plan Funding and Disclosure Monograph, M-RS05-1.

Description: This paper examines the funding expectations of the three primary stakeholders in the pension system: plan sponsors, taxpayers, and workers. From The Future of Pension Plan Funding and Disclosure Monograph, M-RS05-1.

Description: This paper presents the findings of a study which examines four age groups of retirees and how well they are meeting their financial needs and how much an effect real estate can have on meeting retirement expenses.

Description: This paper examines the effects that the recent housing bubble had on the household financial behavior of different birth cohorts and the consequences of those behavioral choices for boomers’ projected retirement security.

Description: Discussant comments for the 2009 Housing Wealth monograph paper, Housing Wealth Effects, Boomer Refinancing, Housing Debt, and Retirement Saving Adequacy-1989-2007. This paper examines the effects that the recent housing bubble had on the household financial behavior of different birth cohorts and the consequences of those behavioral choices for boomers’ projected retirement security. The authors' presentation is very much fact based... and leave it to others who may want to speculate on the implications of the findings.

Description: This paper explores the context for retirement in the future, sets forth alternative scenarios for retirement and considers the public policy, individual, and family implications of these scenarios.

Description: This paper proposes a mandatory universal pension system MUPS which would be a system of fully portable IRA accounts piggy-backed on to existing Social Security withholding.

Description: The adoption of FAS 158 forces sponsors of post-employment health benefit plans to consider how to manage the volatility that changes in medical care inflation create in the other postemployment benefits (OPEB) liability. By choosing carefully how the nominal discount rate used for the liability is decomposed into real rates and inflation, I illustrate that the true exposure to an OPEB plan is to the spread of medical care inflation above (or below) the overall inflation rate. The implication is that an effective immunization strategy exists that can eliminate most of the volatility in the OPEB account.