February 2017

04Feb

Why Do Firms Offer Risky Defined Benefit Pension Plans?

By David A. Love, Paul A. Smith, & David Wilcox Even risky pension sponsors could offer essentially riskless pension promises by contributing a sufficient level of resources to their pension trust funds and by investing those resources in fixed-income securities designed to deliver their payoffs just as pension obligations are coming due. However, almost no firm has chosen to fund its plan in this manner. We study the optimal funding choice for plan sponsors by developing a simple model of...

February 4, 2017
Articles, Corporate Governance, Investing,
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04Feb

Should Risky Firms Offer Risk-Free DB Pensions?

By David A. Love, Paul A. Smith, & David Wilcox We develop a simple model of pension financing to study the effects of pension risk on shareholder value. In the model, firms minimize costs, total compensation must clear the labor market, and a government pension insurer guarantees a portion of promised benefits. We find that in the absence of mispriced pension insurance, the optimal pension strategy under most specifications is to immunize all sources of market risk. Mispriced pension insurance,...

February 4, 2017
Articles, Corporate Governance, Investing,
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04Feb

Do Pension Plans with Participant Investment Choice Teach Households to Hold More Equity?

By Scott Weisbenner Some retirement plans allow the participant to choose how funds are invested. Having to direct investments may provide the participant with financial education. This paper finds that households covered by pension plans in which the employee chooses investments are significantly more apt to hold stock outside of their retirement plan than are households with pension plans offering no such choice. The effect of investment choice upon non-pension asset allocation cannot be explained by portfolio rebalancing or differences...

February 4, 2017
Articles, Investing, Labor Market, Savings,
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04Feb

Footnotes Arent Enough: The Impact of Pension Accounting on Stock Values

By Julia Coronado, Olivia S. Mitchell, Steven A. Sharpe & S. Blake Nesbitt Some research has suggested that companies with defined benefit (DB) pensions are sometimes significantly misvalued by the market. This is because the measures of pension cost and pension net liabilities embedded in financial statements, taken at face value, can provide a very misleading picture of pension finances. The more pertinent information on pension finances is relegated to footnotes, but this might not receive much attention from portfolio...

February 4, 2017
Articles, Investing
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04Feb

Workers' Knowledge of their Pension Coverage: A Reevaluation

By Martha Starr-McCluer & Annika Sundén Because employer-provided pensions represent an important source of income during retirement, accurate information on pension coverage would seem to be crucial for making sound decisions on retirement timing, saving and portfolio allocation. However, previous research suggests that workers’ knowledge of their pension provisions is often incomplete or incorrect. This paper re-examines workers’ knowledge of their pension coverage, using matched employer-employee data from the Federal Reserve Board’s Survey of Consumer Finances. We find that, while...

February 4, 2017
Aging, Articles, Labor Market,
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04Feb

Workers’ Knowledge of their Pension Coverage: A Reevaluation

By Martha Starr-McCluer & Annika Sundén Because employer-provided pensions represent an important source of income during retirement, accurate information on pension coverage would seem to be crucial for making sound decisions on retirement timing, saving and portfolio allocation. However, previous research suggests that workers’ knowledge of their pension provisions is often incomplete or incorrect. This paper re-examines workers’ knowledge of their pension coverage, using matched employer-employee data from the Federal Reserve Board’s Survey of Consumer Finances. We find that, while...

February 4, 2017
Aging, Articles, Labor Market,
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04Feb

Cash Balance Pension Plan Conversions and the New Economy

By Julia Coronado & Phillip Copeland Many firms that sponsor traditional defined benefit pensions have converted their plans to cash balance plans in the last ten years. Cash balance plans combine features of defined benefit (DB) and defined contribution (DC) plans, and yet their introduction has proven considerably more controversial than has the increasing popularity of DC plans. The goal of this study is to estimate a hierarchy of the influences on the decision of a firm to convert its...

February 4, 2017
Articles, Investing, Pension design,
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04Feb

Did Pension Plan Accounting Contribute to a Stock Market Bubble?

By Julia Coronado & Steven Sharpe During the 1990s, the asset portfolios of defined benefit (DB) pension plans ballooned with the booming stock market. Due to current accounting guidelines, the robust growth in pension assets resulted in a stealthy but substantial boost to the profits of sponsoring corporations. This study assesses the extent to which equity investors were fooled by pension accounting. First, we test whether stock prices reflected the fair market value of sponsoring firms’ net pension assets reported...

February 4, 2017
Articles, Corporate Governance, Investing, Regulation
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04Feb

Changing Frameworks for Retirement Security

By Olivia S. Mitchell In 1963, the termination of the Studebaker Corporation’s pension plan wiped out or significantly reduced the pensions of thousands of the automaker’s employees and retirees. In response, Congress passed the 1974 Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA), a monumental and revolutionary piece of legislation crafted to address corporate pension underfunding and set new rules regarding defined benefit (DB) and other retirement plans. ERISA also established the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation as a government-run insurer to serve...

February 4, 2017
Articles, Corporate Governance, Regulation, ,
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04Feb

Aging and Financial Victimization: How Should the Financial Service Industry Respond?

By Marguerite DeLiema and Martha Deevy Elder financial victimization is a growing problem facing older Americans. As the conduits of financial transactions, financial firms are positioned to stop losses at their source. Representatives at small and large firms were interviewed to describe their financial exploitation training and prevention programs, their detection and response protocols, and how they balance the goals of client protection with the client’s right to autonomy and privacy in financial decision-making. Representatives from regulatory agencies were interviewed...

February 4, 2017
Aging, Articles, Corporate Governance, ,
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