Description: A primer for pension actuaries and others to learn what financial economics says about how pension plans are designed, invested, accounted for and funded. This guide focused on private single employer plans with widely held stock.

Description: This is an Excel workbook containing links to papers, articles and newsletters which are useful to the study of the principles of finance and their application to pension plans. Topics include accounting, assumptions/methods, actuarial standards, behavioral economics, design, financial economics, full funding, immunization, investments, minimum funding, market value, pension finance, PBGC, risk, and traditional defined benefit view. For each document listed in the workbook, its abstract or a short synopsis is also included to help the user choose appropriate readings.

Description: A mathematical framework for benefits and choices must be created to model benefit selection. This paper creates such a framework by defining benefit plans as reimbursement functions. These are then used with a defined choice function to calculate the cost deviation due to selection. Finally, utility functions can be applied to this framework to predict choice.