Description: This study explores whether public pension plans have contributed enough to reduce unfunded liabilities, absent other influences such as investment returns.

Description: This study examines reductions in retirement benefits from the decline in defined benefit plans and increases in defined contribution plans during the past 20 years and what effect this has on workforce management. In particular how this change is affecting older workers’ decisions to retire and what effect this could have on companies. An underlying assumption implicit in evaluating the benefit of retirement of older workers is that productivity declines in old age while pay does not, leading to a pay productivity gap that could have an adverse effect on the employer from delayed retirement. The validity of this assumption was also examined.

Description: A frustrating aspect of pension funding rules for U.S. plan sponsors is that contribution requirements are adversely correlated with business cycles. For example, not only did plan sponsors get hit with large contribution requirements in the perfect storm of the early 2000s, but many sponsors were prohibited from contributing in the late 1990s boom due to full funding limitations. This paper proposes that plan sponsors be allowed to contribute the normal cost as a deductible contribution each year. In hindsight, this would have allowed plan sponsors to pay for benefits as they accrued in the late 1990s and ultimately mitigated some of the crash of the early 2000s. The authors aim to demonstrate that a contribution policy allowing contributions to be at least equal to the normal cost will result in less volatility of contributions and improve the funded status over time.

Description: Updated metrics for measuring financial stress among multiemployer pension plans in the United States.

Description: A supplemental report conducted in 2009 to contrast results of the 2008 study, 'Will Retirement Assets Last a Lifetime'? It discusses retirees confidence in having sufficient assets to fully fund their retirement, their willingness to take risk, efforts to control spending and their use of financial advisers.

Description: The purpose of this report is to describe our modified approach, provide our rationale, and identify as best we can the alternatives put forward by actuaries who do not share our views.

Description: Updated study of metrics for measuring stress imposed on US multiemployer pension plans by unfunded liabilities and declining numbers of active participants

Description: Metrics for measuring pension plan contributions against benchmarks for achieving specific financial funding goals.

Description: This research report, based on Ontario pension plan data, examines differences between going concern and solvency valuations.

Description: Study of the impact of IRS proposed mortality tables on private sector pension plan costs, including liabilities, contributions and PBGC premiums.