Description: Presented at the Living to 100 Symposium, January 2011. This paper looks at issues with regard to long life and managing risk by individuals. It focuses on how structuring of payouts interacts with issues related to long life, and also discusses cash benefits and health-related benefits.

Description: This paper recommends four criteria for measuring the adequacy of proposed funding policies.

Description: In this article, the author talks about the pension environment and pension plans in Germany.

Description: This study explores whether public pension plans have contributed enough to reduce unfunded liabilities, absent other influences such as investment returns.

Description: Table constructed from lifetime long-term care cost studies conducted by P.J. Eric Stallard, ASA, FCA, MAAA, Center for Demographic Studies, Duke University.

Description: This article aimed to make Liability Driven Investing LDI more accessible by providing a simple definition and by showing how plans of different sizes and circumstances may adopt an appropriate LDI approach.

Description: This is a summary of a new research paper entitled: “Determining Discount Rates Required to Fund Defined Benefit Plans” by John Turner and three other economists, which describes a new way to look at pension funding for ongoing plans that is a variant of using expected returns (currently used in public plans) that takes into account the risk that contributions will be needed in the future for this year’s benefit accruals.

Description: This is the abstract for a paper that seeks to construct a new system for pension funding that balances the needs of all the pension stakeholders. The paper presents a system that supports plan sponsors’ needs for predictable and relatively smooth contribution streams with the needs of the PBGC, pensioners, and taxpayers for a well-funded system. From The Future of Pension Plan Funding and Disclosure Monograph, M-RS05-1.

Description: A frustrating aspect of pension funding rules for U.S. plan sponsors is that contribution requirements are adversely correlated with business cycles. For example, not only did plan sponsors get hit with large contribution requirements in the perfect storm of the early 2000s, but many sponsors were prohibited from contributing in the late 1990s boom due to full funding limitations. This paper proposes that plan sponsors be allowed to contribute the normal cost as a deductible contribution each year. In hindsight, this would have allowed plan sponsors to pay for benefits as they accrued in the late 1990s and ultimately mitigated some of the crash of the early 2000s. The authors aim to demonstrate that a contribution policy allowing contributions to be at least equal to the normal cost will result in less volatility of contributions and improve the funded status over time.