Real-world Shocks and Retirement System Resiliency

Growing awareness of real-world shocks including market downturns, health surprises, and labor market readjustment is calling into question the ability of global retirement systems to remain healthy and sustain future retirees.

Olivia S. Mitchell is the International Foundation of Employee Benefit Plans Professor, and Professor of Insurance/Risk Management and Business Economics/Policy; Executive Director of the Pension Research Council; and Director of the Boettner Center on Pensions and Retirement Research; all at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Concurrently Dr. Mitchell serves as a Research Associate at the NBER; Independent Director on the Allspring Funds Boards; Co-Investigator for the Health and Retirement Study at the University of Michigan; and Executive Board Member for the Michigan Retirement Research Center. She also serves on the Academic Advisory Council for the Consumer Finance Institute at the Philadelphia Federal Reserve; and the UNSW Centre for Pensions and Superannuation. She earned her B.A. in Economics from Harvard University, and her M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Economics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.


John Sabelhaus is a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington DC and Adjunct Research Professor at the University of Michigan. Previously he was a Visiting Scholar at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth and served as Assistant Director in the Division of Research and Statistics at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. There he oversaw the Microeconomic Surveys and Household and Business Spending sections, including primary responsibility for the Survey of Consumer Finances. He also was a Senior Economist at the Investment Company Institute and Chief of Long Term Modeling at the Congressional Budget Office, where he oversaw the development of an integrated micro/macro model of Social Security and Medicare.


Stephen P. Utkus previously worked as an officer and researcher at Vanguard, where he directed retirement security and investor behavior research teams. He is currently a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania and Georgetown University. He received a bachelor's degree from MIT and an MBA from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.