From the Wharton School, offering a comprehensive assessment of the political and financial dimensions of public-sector pensions from the colonial period until the emergence of modern retirement plans in the twentieth century.

As the United States comes to terms with the pending insolvency of social security, workers are increasingly pinning their hopes for retirement adequacy on employer-sponsored plans. Positioning Pensions for the Twenty-First Century analyzes the role of pensions in retirement security, examining how these programs will evolve to meet the challenges to our nation's retirement system. The book brings together a team of leading economists, corporate and labor specialists, actuaries, and policy experts to examine the future of retirement options within the context of emerging labor and business trends and innovative developments in the pension community. They show how a successful public and private pension system can be sustained and strengthened and demonstrate how employer pensions can be configured against a delicately financed social insurance system. The book's contributions examine where pensions have succeeded and failed over the last several decades and point to positive new developments in the pension arena. Its coverage includes innovative pension options such as hybrid and cash-balance plans; pension funding regulations; changes in GATT laws altering pension insurance premiums; and emerging developments concerning administrative costs and pension obligation bonds. It also features new research on defined contribution plan investment options and includes three case studies of participant-directed pension investments, telling how thousands of workers are allocating their pension savings in 401(k) and related plans. Positioning Pensions for the Twenty-First Century is essential reading for all managers, employees, and policymakers concerned with designing pension systems that can withstand the challenges of the next decade.

Covers retirement, disability, survivor and health care benefits.

An analysis of the effect of public pension schemes on a country's fertility rate and a proposal for policies to reform pension coverage in light of this. The rapidly aging populations of many developed countries--most notably Japan and member countries of the European Union--present obvious problems for the public pension plans of these countries. Not only will there be disproportionately fewer workers making pension contributions than there are retirees drawing pension benefits, but the youth-to-age imbalance would significantly affect the total contributive capacity of future generations and hence their total income growth. In Children and Pensions, Alessandro Cigno and Martin Werding examine the way pension policy and child-related benefits affect fertility behavior and productivity growth. They present theoretical arguments to the effect that public pension coverage as such will reduce aggregate fertility and may raise aggregate household savings. They argue further that public pensions, as they are currently designed, discourage parents from private human capital investment in their children to improve the children's future earning capacity. After an overview of pension and child benefit policies (focusing on the European Union, Japan, and the United States), the authors offer an empirical and theoretical analysis and a simulation of the effects of the policies under discussion. Their policy proposals to address declines in fertility and productivity growth include the innovative suggestion that relates a person's pension entitlements to his or her number of children and the children's earning ability--proposing that, in effect, a person's pension could be financed in part or in full by the pensioner's own children.

Research report on various economic models of the income opportunities of older workers in the USA to investigate the effect on retirement decisions - examines the determinants of retirement (health, social security, occupational pension schemes, private sector assets); presents regression, discrete choice and nonparametric models to evaluate retirement age responses to a change in budget sets; reviews explanation of workers' retirement age preferences across a sample of ten pension schemes; includes simulations of effects of 4 social security reforms on retirees' income.

The report analyses the retirement income systems of 18 Asian countries, including Australia, China, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, the Philippines and Vietnam. It says that reform is needed because: coverage of formal pension systems is relatively ...