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April 2020

Freezing A Defined Benefit Plan To Reduce Current Year Contribution Obligation

Defined benefit pension plans, including cash balance plans, require a contribution each year, which is primarily used to fund the benefits which participants accrue (i.e., earn) during the plan year. The annual required contribution may also include an amount needed to make up a shortfall in a prior year in the investment return on plan assets. In most defined benefit pension plans, a participant earns a benefit for a plan year after working 1,000 or more hours during that...

The Political (In)Stability of Funded Pension Systems

By Roel M. W. J. Beetsma, Oliwia Komada, Krzysztof Makarski, Joanna Tyrowicz We analyze the political stability of capital funded social security. In particular, using a stylized theoretical framework we study the mechanisms behind governments capturing pension assets in order to lower current taxes. This is followed by an analysis of the analogous mechanisms in a fully-edged overlapping generations model with intra-cohort heterogeneity. Funding is efficient in a Kaldor-Hicks sense. Individuals vote on capturing the accumulated pension assets and...

February 2020

Pensions and Legal Policy: Lessons on the Shift from Public to Private

By Amanda Cooke This monograph explores the historical position of pensions law in the UK and the recent influences which have led to the introduction of Auto-Enrolment and subsequent reforms. Alternative models, such as the US and Australia are also considered as well as the function of law in bringing about political changes. The question of saving for retirement is of national and international importance and many governments are wrestling with the issue of how to deal with the pension...

June 2019

The Great Pension Debate: Finding Common Ground

By Robert L Brown, Stephen Eadie In the never-ending debate about finding an optimal pension model, many proponents start the discussion at extreme ends of the pension model paradigm. At one extreme is a traditional, fully guaranteed defined-benefit (DB) pension plan. In this plan, all of the risks are born by the plan sponsor given that plans are fully funded. While such plans are growing rare today that is the starting point for many in this debate. At the...

June 2018

Retiring Employees, Unretired Debt: The Surprising Hidden Cost of Federal Employee Pensions

By William B. P. Robson (C.D. Howe Institute) & Alexandre Laurin (C.D. Howe Institute) Ottawa provides its employees with defined-benefit pensions that promise relatively generous benefits to a large current and former workforce. Being largely unfunded, these plans require future taxpayer support. They also create taxpayer risk because the economic value of the benefits they will provide can fluctuate by tens of billions of dollars annually. Current accounting practices understate this burden and the risks these plans create for taxpayers...

July 2017

Optimal Longevity Risk Transfer and Investment Strategies

By Samuel H. Cox (University of Manitoba), Yijia Lin (University of Nebraska) & Sheen Liu (Washington State University) Given the rising cost of maintaining defined benefit (DB) pensions, there has been a surge of activities in recent years by DB plan sponsors to transfer their pension risk through strategies such as buy-ins and buy-outs. As buy-in and buy-out transaction pipelines grow, insurers actively participating in the buy-in and buy-out markets are exposed to significant longevity risk embedded in pension schemes....