June 2018

25Jun

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...

June 25, 2018
Articles, Management, System Sustainability, ,
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16Jun

Public Pensions: State and Local Government Contributions to Underfunded Plans

By United States General Accounting Office (GAO)  Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO reviewed the status of public pension plan funding, focusing on the basic pension plans of state and local governments. GAO found that: (1) states and localities with underfunded pension plans run the risk of reducing future pension benefits to taxpayers or raising revenues; (2) unfunded liabilities for all state and local pension plans totalled $200 billion in 1992; (3) contributions to pension funds in 1992 fell short of...

June 16, 2018
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March 2018

19Mar

The High Cost of Good Intentions: A History of U.S. Federal Entitlement Programs

By John F. Cogan Federal entitlement programs are strewn throughout the pages of U.S. history, springing from the noble purpose of assisting people who are destitute through no fault of their own. Yet as federal entitlement programs have grown, so too have their inefficiency and their cost. Neither tax revenues nor revenues generated by the national economy have been able to keep pace with their rising growth, bringing the national debt to a record peacetime level. The High Cost of...

March 19, 2018
Books, Pension design, System Sustainability, , ,
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February 2018

05Feb

A Framework for Analyzing Defined Benefit Pension Insurance: The Survivor Benefit Plan for Veterans

By William W. Jennings (U.S. Air Force Academy - Department of Management), Jeff Merrell (University of Colorado at Boulder - Leeds School of Business) Thomas O'Malley (U.S. Air Force Academy - Department of Management) & Brian Payne (US Air Force Academy) Millions of defined benefit pensioners must select a pension insurance method. We present a framework for making this decision within the context of US military veterans’ Survivor Benefit Plan (SBP). Federal government subsidies generate a positive expected net payout...

February 5, 2018
Articles, Pension design, Regulation, , ,
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January 2018

22Jan

The Blended Retirement System

By Patrick Weinert For over a century, the military services have provided pensions to active duty members that served 20 years. On January 1, 2018, the military broke with a long tradition and instituted a Blended Retirement System (BRS). This system is designed to enable service members to take some retirement savings with them if they depart before serving 20 years on active duty. Today, many service members have the option to stay with the traditional pension or enroll in...

January 22, 2018
Books, Pension design, Savings, ,
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22Jan

Simulating Pension Income Scenarios with Pencalc: An Illustration for India's National Pension System

By Renuka Sane (Indian Statistical Institute, New Delhi) & William Joseph Price (World Bank) This paper sets out initial results from a new modeling exercise for Defined Contribution (DC) pensions. It develops a package called penCalc based on the open source software language R, which is popular in the academic and modeling communities. All the coding is made freely available. The tool is illustrated for India's DC National Pension System. The aim is not to present the perfect model for...

January 22, 2018
Articles, Labor Market, Pension design, Regulation, , , ,
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22Jan

Simulating Pension Income Scenarios with Pencalc: An Illustration for India’s National Pension System

By Renuka Sane (Indian Statistical Institute, New Delhi) & William Joseph Price (World Bank) This paper sets out initial results from a new modeling exercise for Defined Contribution (DC) pensions. It develops a package called penCalc based on the open source software language R, which is popular in the academic and modeling communities. All the coding is made freely available. The tool is illustrated for India's DC National Pension System. The aim is not to present the perfect model for...

January 22, 2018
Articles, Labor Market, Pension design, Regulation, , , ,
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December 2017

30Dec

Role of Public Employee Pensions in Contributing to State Insolvency and the Possibility of a State Bankruptcy Chapter

By Professor United States Congress Role of public employee pensions in contributing to state insolvency and the possibility of a state bankruptcy chapter hearing before the Subcommittee on Courts, Commercial and Administrative Law of the Committee on the Judiciary, House of Representatives, One Hundred Twelfth Congress, first session, February 14, 2011. (more…)

December 30, 2017
Books, System Sustainability,
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