Reorienting Retirement Risk Management

Retirement risk management must be dramatically overhauled if workers and retirees are to better prepare themselves to meet future retirement challenges. Recent economic events including the global financial crisis have upended expectations about what pension and endowment fund managers can do. Employers and employees have found it difficult to make pension contributions, despite drops in retirement plan funding. In many countries, government social security systems are also facing insolvency. These factors, coupled with an aging population and rising longevity, are giving rise to serious questions about the future of retirement in America and around the world.

This volume explores how workers and firms can reassess the risks associated with retirement saving and dissaving, to identify creative adjustments and adapt to these new realities. Other areas explored include the key role for financial literacy and education programs, the necessity of those acting as plan sponsors and fiduciaries to reconsider pension design, and the arrival of novel financial products that can help with the design of retirement plans. Experts provide new research and offer policy recommendations, illustrating how retirement plans can be amended to better meet the retirement needs of workers and firms.

This volume is an important addition to the Pensions Research Council / Oxford University Press series and to the current debate on retirement security.

Olivia S. Mitchell is the International Foundation of Employee Benefit Plans Professor of Insurance and Risk Management, the Executive Director of the Pension Research Council, and the Director of the Boettner Center on Pensions and Retirement Research at the Wharton School. Concurrently Dr. Mitchell is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a Co-Investigator for the AHEAD/Health and Retirement Studies at the University of Michigan. Dr. Mitchell's main areas of research and teaching are private and public insurance, risk management, public finance and labor markets, and compensation and pensions, with a US and an international focus. She received the B.A. in Economics from Harvard University and the M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Economics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Robert L. Clark is Professor of Management, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship and Professor of Economics at North Carolina State University. His research interests include retirement decisions, the choice between defined benefit and defined contribution plans, the impact of pension conversions to defined contribution and cash balance plans, the role of information and communications on 401(k) contributions, government regulation of pensions, and Social Security. Professor Clark serves on the Advisory Board of Wharton's Pension Research Council, is a Fellow of the Employee Benefit Research Institute and the TIAA-CREF Institute, and a member of the American Economic Association, the Gerontological Society of America, International Union for the Scientific Study of Population, and the National Academy of Social Insurance. Professor Clark earned an MA and the Ph.D. from Duke University and a BA from Millsaps College.