Resources

  • Teacher Pension Costs: High, Rising, and Out of Control

    While private-sector pension costs have been relatively stable over the last decade at around 10.5 percent of salaries, public school pension costs have climbed from 11.9 percent of salaries in March 2004 to 14.6 percent in 2008 to 17.0 percent in 2013. In other words, the gap between public school teachers and private sector professionals and administrators has increased from 1.9 to 6.4 percent of salaries.
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  • Are Pension Reforms Helping States Attract and Retain the Best Workers?

    This paper uses New Jersey as an example to show that the actuarial assumptions underlying some state pension reforms rely on contributions from new and younger employees to pay off unfunded liabilities owed to workers hired before the reform. Thus, rather than benefiting from any state contribution to their pensions, many new workers are scheduled to be net contributors over their careers. That is, they will get back only their own contributions plus interest, but compounded at a lower rate of return than the state assumes it will earn on plan assets.
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  • The Retirement Savings Crisis: Is It Worse Than We Think?

    This report examines the readiness of working-age households, based primarily on an analysis of the 2010 Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) from the U.S. Federal Reserve. It found that more than 38 million working-age households (45 percent) do not own any retirement account assets, and the average working household has virtually no retirement savings. When all households are included, the median retirement account balance is only $3,000 for all working-age households and $12,000 for near-retirement households.
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  • Creating a Combined Approach to Retirement Security

    One of the most well-known transformations of a pension system occurred when President Ronald Reagan signed the Federal Employees’ Retirement System Act into law on June 6, 1986. This law moved federal employees from the Civil Service Retirement System (CSRS), to a retirement system that integrated Social Security, a DB pension, and a DC savings plan.
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  • Is Nebraska's Cash Balance Pension a Model?

    Nebraska state employees hired since 2003 join what public pension analysts call a "cash balance" retirement plan , which includes features of both a traditional defined benefit pension and a 401(k)-style system. The hybrid plan is getting new attention from other states searching for alternatives to the decades-old defined benefit system whose cost is rising as Baby Boomers retire and pension portfolios recover from record losses during the Great Recession.
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