Description: This paper looks at retirement income planning techniques currently practiced in North America, and then discusses contingencies that are generally omitted from the retirement needs analysis. From Retirement Needs Framework, M-RS00-1.

Description: This paper focuses on when and how we retire.

Description: This paper suggests a possible framework for the mandatory annuitization of U.S. retirement savings, considers the experience of other countries and analyzes the advantages and disadvantages of mandatory annuitization.

Description: This paper explains how legal reforms related to annuities have decreased the popularity of annuities among plan sponsors, and then describes how a proposal for a federal charter option for life insurance companies could hold some promise for persuading plan sponsors to put annuities back into savings plans.

Description: This paper examines the social structures that are determining retirement for female Baby Boomers, and what can be done for these women to reflect the shift from shared responsibility to individual responsibility for retirement security. From Retirement Needs Framework, M-RS00-1.

Description: The purpose of this paper is to consider whether there is a coherent and principled approach to decide the question of what rights if any nonparticipant spouses should have in the retirement plans of participant spouses. From Retirement Needs Framework, M-RS00-1.

Description: In this paper we compute the conditional and unconditional probability of ruin for an individual who wishes to consume a fixed periodic amount from an initial endowment invested in a portfolio earning a stochastic rate of return. From Retirement Needs Framework, M-RS00-1.

Description: The goal of this paper is to help financial professionals and plan sponsors recognize that retirement planning is being influenced by new factors and suggests ways they can readjust retirement planning strategies.

Description: This paper explores comparative trends in home ownership versus renters, the associated levels of housing expenditures, and the extent of equity borrowing. The goal is to stress the need in retirement to cover basic housing needs and the risks of using housing for other purposes.

Description: This paper presents a multi-state stochastic model for analyzing continuing care retirement community CCRC populations. The model considers CCRCs with a number of independent living units and a skilled nursing facility. Residents may transfer temporarily or permanently to this facility. It is assumed that units vacated by deaths, withdrawals or permanent transfers are immediately occupied by new residents. Transfers are modeled using a time-homogeneous Markov process. The paper provides some probabilistic results and some numerical results obtained using this model. Some important generalizations of the model are also briefly discussed.