Pension Design and Structure: New Lessons from Behavioral Finance (Pensions Research Council) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0199273391 ISBN 13: 9780199273393

Publisher: OUP Oxford, 2004

Synopsis

Employees are increasingly asked to make sophisticated decisions about their pension and healthcare plans. Yet recent research shows that the decisions 'real' people make are often not those of the careful and well-informed economic agent conventionally portrayed in economic research. Rather, decision-makers tend to operate with flawed information and make some of the most critical financial decisions of their lives lacking a full understanding of the options before them and the implications of their decisions. Pension Design and Structure explores the assumptions behind commonly-held theories of retirement decision-making, in order to draw out the consequences of frontier research in behavioral finance and economics for those interested in better design and structure of retirement pensions. Using large datasets newly provided by financial service firms and real-world experiments, this volume tests the hypotheses of this research. This is the first book to explore the implications of behavioral finance research for pensions and retirement studies. The authors blend cutting-edge research from several fields including Finance, Economics, Management, Sociology, and Psychology. The book will be of interest to pension plan participants and sponsors, financial service groups responsible for pensions, and retirement system regulators.

About this title

Review

Overall, the book is of a very high standard...This is certainly a book I will appreciate owning and sharing with colleagues. (PEF)

In a very readable way, the authors overview the whole field and offer concise conclusions for pension plan design...Overall, the book is of a very high academic standard, as one would anticipate from this series. (The Journal of Pension Economics and Finance)

About the Author

Olivia S. Mitchell is Executive Director of the Pension Research Council, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania , and also a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Her academic research explores private and publica insurance, risk management, public finance and labour markets, and compensation and pensions, with both a US and international focus. She recently served on President Bush's Commission to Strengthen Social Security. Stephen P. Utkus is the Director of the Vanguard Center for Retirement Research, where he conducts and sponsors research on retirement savings and retirement benefits. His current reserach interests include attitudes and expectations regarding retirement, financial markets, and employer-sponsored retirement plans; the psychological and behavioral aspects of participant decision-making; trading and investment behavior among retirement plan participants; fiduciary issues arising from retirement programs; and global trends in public and private pension plans. Mr Utkus is a member of the advisory board of the Wharton Pension Research Council, and he is currently a Visiting Scholar at The Wharton School.

Edition details

• Publisher: OUP Oxford
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0199273391
• ISBN 13: 9780199273393
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 314
• Editor: Mitchell Olivia S., Utkus Stephen P.