With the passage of the Pension Protection Act of 2006 and the Department of Labor regulation regarding qualified default investment alternatives, automatic enrollment and default investments featuring more equities are likely to become more popular. This analysis compares the investment...

This stochastic simulation analysis compares funding costs and volatilities for private sponsors of traditional defined benefit (DB), pension equity (PE), cash balance (CB), and defined contribution (DC) retirement plans. Plan provisions of equivalent benefit generosity in the different plan...

Discussions are often anchored at fees when investment offerings, such as target date funds, are being vetted for defined contribution plans. A decomposition of wealth accumulation over the life cycle demonstrates the foremost role of persistent savings and, on this foundation, the power of...

Financial advisors commonly use earnings replacement rates to assist workers in their retirement planning. Policymakers and analysts use them to gauge the adequacy of Social Security benefits and other retirement income in allowing retirees to maintain preretirement living standards. In recent...

Several recent assessments suggest that the majority of U.S. workers are at risk of having inadequate resources to maintain their work-life standards of living in retirement. These assessments are often based on models that fail to reflect patterns of income, consumption and savings that vary...

We assess the implications for workers' retirement planning of the provisions on Social Security, Medicare and 401(k) plans from deficit reduction proposals that were put forward by national commissions in 2010. The evaluation uses an updated version of our retirement savings model, which is a...

This analysis examines the implications of proposed payroll tax hikes, income tax increases, and a health care financing surtax for workers' retirement preparation. The retirement savings model is a rational forward-looking framework that aims to maintain a roughly constant standard of living...