Description: This presentation was made at the 1975 Spring Cincinnati Joint Meeting of the Conference of Actuaries in Public Practice and Society of Actuaries. It addresses the following issues: Participation requirements, minimum vesting standards, joint and survivor annuity benefits, maximum limitations, special problems under offset plans, & impact on defined benefit vs. defined contribution plans. 1975 Record, Vol.1, No.3

Description: The survivor principle--that the share of each, at death, is enjoyed by the survivors--can be used to design tontine annuities and tontine pensions.

Description: This paper is a comment on the Tracker Plan, a concept for U.S. pension reform.

Description: This article discusses the non-qualified market opportunities presented by the new limitations imposed on qualified pension plans.

Description: The article endorses broader use of lifetime income in DC plans. It explains why the use of DB plans will continue to decline. The article points out that plans sponsors will not willingly take on additional ERISA fiduciary exposure. The article endorses three regulatory reforms that would increase the use of lifetime income in DC plans. 1. A robust annuity issuer safe harbor that would free employers from fiduciary exposure for putting an annuity provider on the DC platform. 2. A requirement that a plan offer a lifetime income option to qualify for the 404(c) safe harbor. 3. A revision to 404(c) to allow plan sponsors to allocate part or all of the employer match to lifetime income.

Description: Top down approach to retirement results in wasting the human capital of retirees. We should concentrate, instead on allowing our clients to use their human capital to the fullest extent possible, and structure retirement products around that premise.

Description: Current DC plans do an extremely poor job at managing investment and longevity risk for plan participants. This leads to suboptimal outcomes: retirement income is potentially too low, assets are subject to catastrophic losses and may even run out. Insurance solutions—most notably annuities—address some of these issues, but are expensive and not very much liked by consumers. This paper explores how Enhanced Risk Sharing Savings Accounts (“ERiSSA”), consisting of a combination of individual DC accounts with a collective risk sharing and return redistribution mechanism coupled with deferred annuities, might be able to strike a better overall balance for consumers.

Description: This paper develops a set of retirement decision propositions, which hypothesize that the heuristic of Anchoring and the resulting cognitive biases described by Prospect Theory will influence the chosen retirement age. .

Description: The abstract for the paper Tax Considerations in a Mandatory Universal Pension System.

Description: This paper responds to comments on a proposed compulsory savings program combined with transparent investment vehicles designed to promote competition based on expense levels, fund performance and customer service. At retirement 50% of the account is annuitized in Participating Variable Annuity (PVA) backed by TIPS. All investment experience, expenses, and pooled longevity experience is passed to annuitants through periodic benefit adjustments. Annuities are priced uniformly based on age at commencement.