Description: Summary: Panelists discuss considerations in the design of retirement programs in the United States and Canada. From the Record of the Society of Actuaries, Vol. 25, No. 2.

Description: In this article, the author talks about the pension environment and pension plans in Germany.

Description: This paper provides some background about demography, health and retirement summarizes how current pension laws influence the design of pension plans and the timing of retirement and looks at the optimal retirement age from the perspective of employers, government and workers.

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: This article provides a basic introduction to the taxation of qualified annuities held in qualified retirement plans and IRAs. The article has been updated for the SECURE Act and the SECURE 2.0 Act. The article describes the basic types of employer-based plans, provides of overview of the taxation of contributions and benefits when annuities are held in connection with plans and IRAs, explains the required minimum distribution rules, and offers a brief introduction to recent legislation impacting qualified annuities.

Description: Column describing shifting paradigm for retirement plan design in North America that highlights recent SOA research project on Target Benefit Plans.

Description: In response to public inquiries into the indexing of pension plan benefits, the financing of defined-benefit plans with fully indexed benefits is explored. A model career-average pension plan is set up with all accrued benefits fully indexed. For different funding conditions, the changes in pension plan surplus are examined under the economic conditions of 1946-1987. The results show that the fluctuations in surplus can be more easily absorbed if the pension plan balance sheet uses market value of assets and a funding objective which is flexibly related to assets and set in terms of a fixed conventional liability and an asset fluctuation reserve. From Transactions of Society of Actuaries 1992, Vol. 44.

Description: This is a panel discussion session on the developments in the group insurance market in the 1980s including designing benefit plans with the employee as the focus, the cost to the corporate employer, and the group insurance underwriter's outlook.

Description: In this paper, the authors have analyzed the Cash Balance pension and contributions using the methods and principles of financial economics, to give a market consistent evaluation of the costs of the CB liability.

Description: This article discusses the findings of the Retirement Plan Preferences Survey which asked workers participating in defined benefit plans and defined contribution plans which retirement plans they prefer and what they understand. From Pension Section News, March 2004, Issue No. 54.