Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

“Safe” Annuity Retirement Products And A Possible Us Retirement Crisis, Thomas E. Lambert, Christopher B. Tobe

Faculty Scholarship

This paper examines a looming possible crisis in many Americans’ retirement plans due to the proliferation of annuity products in their retirement investment portfolios. As defined benefit pension plans have almost completely disappeared as a means of retirement savings and have been replaced by defined contribution retirement plans over the last 40 to 50 years, a great number of private and public sector defined contribution retirement plans have become laden with insurance contracts called annuities. Of the remaining solid defined benefit plans many, through a process called Pension Risk Transfer are being converted to high-risk single entity annuities. Such products …

“You Need To Allow Yourself To Grieve That Loss And That Identity.” College Athletes’ Transition To Life After College Sport.”, Clare Manthey, Jimmy Smith

Journal of Athlete Development and Experience

Only a small percentage of collegiate athletes compete at the professional level of sport after they graduate, leaving most athletes to transition out of a life involved in sport. Research reviewing life after competitive sport for college athletes and the consequences associated with such a transition is plentiful, however, additional research also argues that life transition research is necessary to maximize the understanding of such a phenomenon. A case study approach used Schlossberg’s Theory of Transition (2011) to research recently retired collegiate college athletes and their time transitioning away from competitive college sports. Several themes emerged from the qualitative results …

J Mich Dent Assoc December 2021

The Journal of the Michigan Dental Association

Every month, The Journal of the Michigan Dental Association brings news, information, and features about Michigan dentistry to our state's oral health community and the MDA's 6,200+ members. No publication reaches more Michigan dentists!

In this issue, the reader will find the following original content:

• Two cover stories presenting perspectives from both ends of the practice life continuum: “Starting Your Practice Life” and “Preparing for Retirement”.
• A feature article, “What Happened in Vegas Became ADA Policy”.
• A feature article, “An Oversight Corrected: 2020 MDA Life Members Recognized”.
• The 2021 Author/Title Index to the Journal of the Michigan Dental Association. …

Trust And Retirement Preparedness: Evidence From Singapore, Benedict S. K. Koh, Olivia S. Mitchell, Joelle H. Fong

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Trust is an essential component of any financial system, and distrust can undermine savings and economic growth. Our study draws on the Singapore Life Panel to assess how trust ties to older respondents’ (1) pension plan participation and withdrawals; (2) life, health, and long-term care insurance holdings; and (3) stock market engagement. We show that the widely-used ‘trust in people’ question is uncorrelated with household behaviours related to retirement preparedness. Instead, trust in private and public financial representatives is positively associated with pension savings, investments, and insurance holdings. Financial literacy also plays an important and consistent role in retirement decision-making.

Financial Literacy And Financial Decision-Making At Older Ages, Joelle H. Fong, Seng Kee Benedict Koh, Olivia S. Mitchell, Susann Rohwedder

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

How well older households manage their wealth holdings is an important determinant of their financial security during retirement, yet little is known about their financial decision-making and how this relates to their financial literacy. Our paper fills this gap by measuring financial literacy among older persons in the Singapore Life Panel and examining its association with timely credit card debt repayment, stock market participation, and age-based investment risk diversification. Most older respondents understand interest compounding and inflation, but fewer than half know about risk diversification. Almost all older credit card holders pay off their balances in a timely manner, but …

Retired Military Officers’ Length Of Service And Loss Of Social Identity In Second Careers, Moriah Elizabeth Thomas

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Many past researchers have reported problematic issues and challenges with militarypersonnel transitioning to civilian life and to the civilian workplace. The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore the lived experiences of 20 retired military officers who had between 24 and 42 years of military service regarding how they may have experienced the losses of social identity and organizational socialization and how those losses may have impacted their second careers in civilian organizations. Data for this study were collected via semistructured interviews and the use of interview protocols. The conceptual framework consisted of a combination of social identity theory …

Financial Knowledge And Portfolio Complexity In Singapore, Benedict S. K. Koh, Olivia S. Mitchell, Susann Rohwedder

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Financial literacy in Singapore has not been analyzed in much detail, despite the fact that this is one of the world’s most rapidly aging nations. Using the Singapore Life Panel®, we explore older Singaporeans’ levels of financial knowledge and compare them to those observed in the United States. We assess portfolio complexity for these older households, to examine how financial literacy is related to outcomes of interest. We show that older Singaporeans’ levels of financial literacy are comparable overall to those in the United States, even though older Singaporeans score slightly lower on some dimensions (knowledge of interest and inflation), …

Psychological Well-Being During Retirement Transition And Adjustment For Southern Baptist Pastors: A Phenomenological Multi-Case Study, Tresa Gamblin

Human Resource Development Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this phenomenological multi-case study was to understand the psychological well-being experience of Southern Baptist pastors during transition and adjustment to retirement. Questions centered around their upbringing, their calling experience, their education, career progression in churches, reasons for retiring, preparation for retirement, experience after retiring, and how identity and purpose may or may not have been related to their role as pastor. The goal of the study was to investigate these experiences to provide rich data and analysis that is missing in current literature.

The research was based on two theories: continuity theory and role theory. The study …

The Impact Of Career Experiences On Generativity And Postretirement Choices For Intelligence Community Baby Boomers, Marianne Victoria Kramer

Antioch University Full-Text Dissertations & Theses

This study focused on baby boomers and explored how a career with a mission-focus in the Intelligence Community influenced boomer generativity and subsequent choices after retirement. Baby boomers make-up the majority of the population that is retirement eligible today and have the benefit of a longer life expectancy commensurate with improvements in health care over the past century. Current retirement literature covers a range of options that redefine what retirement means today. This study employed a two-phase mixed method approach to investigate the characteristics and impacts of a mission-focused career, and to understand how such experiences impact postretirement opportunities and …

Research Summary: Does Front-Loading Taxation Increase Savings? Evidence From Roth 401(K) Introductions, Parker Gardner

Marriott Student Review

Can taxing retirement savings upfront increase buying power in retirement? BYU Marriott School of Management Dean Brigitte Madrian and fellow researches examine the impact of Roth 401(k)s on retirement savings and find that the introduction of Roth 401(k)s does not impact the dollar amount invested into 401(k)s.

Self-Employment In Later Life: Implications For Financial, Physical, And Mental Well-Being, Cal Halvorsen

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

More than one in five working Americans aged 50 and older are self-employed, yet scholarship that examines the relationships between self-employment and personal health and financial well-being is limited. Using data from six biennial waves of the Health and Retirement Study, a nationally-representative panel study of Americans past 50 years of age, this quasi-experimental dissertation documents the characteristics of self-employed older adults in comparison to wage-and-salary workers, as well as compares self-employed and wage-and-salary workers in later life on a set of financial well-being and personal health outcomes. This study incorporates inverse probability of treatment weighting (also referred to as …

Who Bleeds When The Wolves Bite? A Flesh-And-Blood Perspective On Hedge Fund Activism And Our Strange Corporate Governance System, Leo E. Strine Jr.

All Faculty Scholarship

This paper examines the effects of hedge fund activism and so-called wolf pack activity on the ordinary human beings—the human investors—who fund our capital markets but who, as indirect of owners of corporate equity, have only limited direct power to ensure that the capital they contribute is deployed to serve their welfare and in turn the broader social good.

Most human investors in fact depend much more on their labor than on their equity for their wealth and therefore care deeply about whether our corporate governance system creates incentives for corporations to create and sustain jobs for them. And because …

Restructuring Social Security: How Will Retirement Ages Respond?, Gary S. Fields, Olivia S. Mitchell

Gary S Fields

[Excerpt] Budgetary pressures on the Social Security system have increased in recent years, prompting a variety of proposals to restructure the U.S. retirement income program. Most of these proposals ignore the possibility that the retirement patterns of older workers are likely to respond to changes in the incentives to retire. This chapter presents two important pieces of information for policymakers. First, we provide previously unavailable evidence on how changes in the structure of Social Security benefits would alter the economic incentives to retire at different ages. Second, we compute how retirement patterns would change in response to altered incentives to …

Boom & Bust: The Perils Of Guaranteed Long Term Contracts. Evidence From Ops100 Performance Over The Contract Cycle, Heather M. O'Neill

Business and Economics Faculty Publications

This study focuses on panel data of 256 MLB free agent hitters under the 2006-2011 Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) to demonstrate that hitters, on average, increase their offensive production, measured by OPS100, during the last year of their contract and subsequently underperform the first year of the newly signed long term contract. The contract year phenomenon arises from the incentive to land a lucrative guaranteed contract for players not intending to retire. Signing a long term guaranteed contract creates an incentive to shirk (underperform) the first year of the new contract because performance and pay become unlinked and the need …

Finding A Financial Planner, Emily G. Brown Jd

Pension Action Center Publications

This fact sheet provides information on how to find the right financial planner to help you meet your retirement planning goals. This fact sheet suggests things to consider prior to picking a financial planner and answers questions like:

• What do financial planners do?
• How do you know if you need a financial planner?
• How do you find the right financial planner?
• What type of professional title does a financial planner have?

Your Former Employer’S 401(K) Plan, Jeanne Medeiros Jd

Pension Action Center Publications

When you leave a job where you have participated in a 401(k) plan, you may have a number of different options about what to do with the money in that account. This fact sheet explains those options and offers guidance about the pros and cons of each option.

Here are some frequently asked questions answered in this face sheet:

Q. Can I leave my money in my former employer’s plan?

Q. What are my other options?

Q. If I decide to withdraw the account balance from my former employer’s plan, how do I do that, and how long should it …

Hardship Withdrawals And Loans: Some Words Of Caution, Emily G. Brown Jd, Jeanne Medeiros Jd, Ellen Bruce Jd

Pension Action Center Publications

As defined benefit pension plans become more and more rare, the responsibility of saving for retirement falls increasingly on individuals. Many studies have been published about the average or median balances in retirement savings accounts and virtually all of them have reached the same conclusion - most Americans aren’t saving enough money to last them through their retirement years.

In this fact sheet we will take a look at one of the factors that contributes to this problem, that is, the availability of loans and hardship withdrawals from 401(k) retirement accounts, which can lead to lower account balances overall. Sometimes, …

Getting The Most Out Of Your 401(K), Emily G. Brown Jd, Jeanne Medeiros Jd

Pension Action Center Publications

Planning for your retirement is an active and ongoing endeavor. It requires a certain amount of diligence and knowledge to ensure you have an adequate amount of financial stability at retirement. In order to safeguard your economic security, it is important to know if you are getting the most out of your 401(k) retirement savings account. This factsheet provides basic information about enrolling in a 401(k) retirement savings account and important items to keep in mind once you are enrolled.

I'M Retiring ... Well, Sort Of, Kevin F. Hallock

Economics Faculty Publications

I’m 45 years old and I’m retiring ... from writing regular columns for workspan. And that has me thinking about retirement and incentives as part of a total rewards system.

Understanding The Differences Between Defined Benefit Pension And Defined Contribution, Emily G. Brown Jd, Jeanne Medeiros Jd

Pension Action Center Publications

In recent years, more and more employers are offering employees defined contribution plans instead of defined benefit plans. Although, there has been a shift away from the defined benefit pension plan, it is important for employees to understand the difference and value of both pension plans.

Each type of pension plan has both advantages and disadvantages. What may appear as an advantage to one person might seem to be a disadvantage to another person. For example, a person who spends all or most of her career with a single employer will have very different concerns from someone who changes jobs …

Understanding The Specialized Language Of Retirement Plans, Emily G. Brown Jd, Jeanne Medeiros Jd

Pension Action Center Publications

Whether you are a participant in a defined benefit plan or a defined contribution plan, the realm of pension benefits can be tricky and confusing to navigate. Some of the terminology used might be unfamiliar to the average person. This glossary of common terms associated with retirement plans is meant to serve as a helpful resource for plan participants.

Making Sense Of Late Academic Careers: Stories, Images, And Reflections, Stephen Brown, John Ogilvie, Diana Stork, Jill Woodilla

Organization Management Journal

Four late-career academics take a “first person” view of their careers over time, using written autobiographies. These stories were coded for common phases, themes, and tensions, retold as narratives, reimagined as metaphors, and recreated as visual stories. A brief overview of relevant career theory and identity theory is presented, and various activities undertaken during the self-discovery process are described and linked to storytelling or narrative theory. Interpretation focuses on similarities and differences in the four late academic careers and identity work during role transitions. Connections are made to career theory and identity theory. The authors believe this article might serve …

Do Hitters Boost Their Performance During Their Contract Years?, Heather M. O'Neill

Business and Economics Faculty Publications

Each season, baseball fans and journalists alike identify which players are in the final years of their contracts because a lot rides on how the players produce in their “contract year.” Will a player boost his effort and performance in an effort to improve his value and bargaining power? Or will he crumble under the pressure? Or are players’ performances uncorrelated with where they stand in their contract cycles?

Do Mlb Hitters Boost Performance In Their Contract Year?, Heather M. O'Neill

Business and Economics Faculty Publications

This study focuses on 256 MLB free agent hitters playing under the 2006-2011 CBA to determine whether they boost their offensive performance in their contract year. Prior studies’ results are mixed, depending on the econometric technique used and the choice of the offensive performance measure.

Having multiple year observations per player, one can incorporate the unobserved traits of the players (ability, risk aversion, work ethic, etc.) by using Fixed Effects (FE) estimation. Since these unmeasured player traits are likely to be correlated with observed predictors of performance (games played, playoff contention, age, etc.), traditionally used Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) and …

Our Retirement In Their Hands: A User Perspective, Cotinne Cortese, David Aylward, John Glynn

John J Glynn

This research reports on the results of a survey of Australian retirees which provide information on attitudes surrounding financial planning advice before, at or after retirement. These results demonstrate that, despite government initiatives aimed at enhancing consumer confidence in the financial services market, most retirees continue to feel dissatisfied with, and lack confidence in, the services provided by their financial advisors. This suggests an increased role for financial planners to provide not only the additional information required under government policy, but also to provide information that is understandable and useful to the retirees that rely on it.

Retirement System Characteristics And Compensating Wage Differentials In The Public Sector, Ronald G. Ehrenberg

Ronald G. Ehrenberg

This paper presents evidence that a trade-off exists between wages and certain characteristics of retirement systems in the public sector. Cross-section econometric estimates for uniformed municipal employees, based upon data from two national surveys of municipalities, suggest that, other things equal, an increase in the contribution made by uniformed employees to their retirement system leads to a compensating increase in their salaries, while retirement systems with more "generous" characteristics are associated to some extent with lower salaries. The estimates also indicate that the extent of retirement system underfunding is related to employers' and employees' perceptions of the probability that promised …

Upjohn Institute Policy Paper: Public Pension Crisis And Investment Risk Taking: Underfunding, Fiscal Constraints, Public Accounting, And Policy Implications, Nancy Mohan, Ting Zhang

Economics and Finance Faculty Publications

Public pension funds that cover retirement benefits for almost 20 million active or retired employees have been significantly underfunded. An important, though largely overlooked, issue related to pension underfunding is the excessive investment risk levels assumed by public plans. Our analysis suggests government accounting standards strongly affect public fund investment risk, as higher return assumptions (used to discount pension liabilities) are associated with higher investment risk.

Public funds undertake more risk if they are underfunded and have lower investment returns in previous years, consistent with the risk transfer hypothesis. Furthermore, pension funds in states facing fiscal constraints allocate more assets …

[Review Of The Book Forecasting Retirement Needs And Retirement Wealth], Gary Fields

Gary S Fields

[Excerpt] This volume enables researchers to learn about some of the latest research findings on specific issues. It is not the place to seek an introduction to current thinking on retirement, pensions, and Social Security—the papers are too narrowly focused for that. But for current or would-he pension specialists, this volume and the larger series of which it is a part are indispensable resources.

[Review Of The Book Private Pension Policies In Industrialized Countries: A Comparative Analysis], Gary S. Fields

Gary S Fields

[Excerpt] John Turner and Noriyasu Watanabe have written numerous articles and books on pensions and employee benefits. In this collaborative effort, they synthesize a great deal of institutional and analytical material on a wide range of countries, including those typically regarded as industrialized (most of the OECD countries are the subjects of case studies and illustrations) and those that would probably be happy to learn that they now fall into that category (in particular, Chile and Argentina). The book is both accessible (there are no equations in sight) and analytical.

The Economics Of Retirement Behavior, Olivia S. Mitchell, Gary S. Fields

Gary S Fields

This paper examines the role of economic factors in determining retirement behavior using a unique new data archive on more than 8,700 workers covered by 10 different pension plans. We build on our earlier work by estimating several different retirement models including both linear and discrete choice formulations. This framework provides new insights into how and why retirement ages differ across firms. We conclude that older workers' income opportunities differ depending on their pension rules, which in turn have a powerful influence on their retirement patterns. In addition, the models indicate that older workers' tastes for income are not uniform, …