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Pension Governance, LLC Sponsors Research Sites on the Social Science Research Network

Excerpt: Pension Governance, LLC (our sister company) is pleased to announce the sponsorship of two sections of the Social Science Research Network. Check them out [http://www.ssrn.com/update/lsn/lsnann/annA026.html] and see for yourself. You'll find interesting research papers and announcements about forthcoming events in the areas of employee benefits law and corporate governance, respectively.

Social Security in a Changing Environment: Findings from the Retirement Research Center at the National Bureau of Economic Research

Excerpt: Since September 2003, the Retirement Research Center at the National Bureau of Economic Research has conducted a coordinated series of investigations on Social Security in a changing environment and the potential routes to sustainable solvency. The Center supports extensive collaborative research over a multiyear horizon to achieve a more fully integrated understanding of Social Security's challenges and the changing environment in which it operates. This article is an overview of the studies completed since the Center's inception.

SSRN Announces New Journal of Abstracts: Employee Benefits, Compensation and Pension Law

Edited by Pamela Perun of the Urban Institute, it will contain abstracts of working papers, forthcoming articles, and recently published articles on fringe benefits, health benefits, qualified and non-qualified pension plans, individual retirement accounts, executive compensation, disability, worker's compensation, Social Security, ERISA and related tax law. It will also feature articles on the economic and legal aspects of retirement income policy in the U.S. and abroad.

Social Security: The House that Roosevelt Built

This brief sets the record straight on Social Security on the following points [and others]: Social Security is neither a 'Ponzi scheme' nor an income transfer program from the young to the old. Social Security is a pension plan in the form of a defined benefit plan. Like most other defined benefit plans, contributors earn a right to a benefit paid at retirement based on their earnings.

The Role of Information for Retirement Behavior: Evidence Based on the Stepwise Introduction of the Social Security Statement

Excerpt: In 1995, the Social Security Administration started sending out the annual Social Security Statement. It contains information about the worker's estimated benefits at the ages 62, 65, and 70. I use this unique natural experiment to analyze the retirement and claiming decision making.'

Earnings Sharing in the U.S. Social Security System: A Microsimulation Analysis of Future Female Retirees

Excerpt: As part of an ongoing effort to analyze the distributional implications of potential policy reforms to the U.S. Social Security system, we consider the widely discussed reform of earnings sharing. Such an approach has been viewed as a way to 'update' Social Security's family benefits based on marital status and as a means to make the system more marriage neutral.

Social Security Benefits Formula: A Practical Primer

Excerpt: Despite the broad and deep reliance on Social Security benefits, very few of the hundreds of millions of current and future beneficiaries understand how the program works. This article presents through a hypothetical couple some of the basic concepts of the Social Security benefits formula.

The Future of Social Security: Principles to Guide Reform

Excerpt: Reform of the Social Security system appears inevitable. The only questions are how and when. This Article discusses the principles that should guide reform. It begins by describing Robert Ball's 'nine guiding principles' underlying the current Social Security system. It then identifies the seven principles that should guide reform of the system. The principles call for retaining Social Security's fundamental structure but gradually introducing changes on both the revenue and benefit side so as to distribute the burden of reform widely across and within generations. Beyond that, the principles offer considerable flexibility in the final details of reform.

What Can Countries in Other Regions Learn from Social Security Reform in Latin America?

Excerpt: The experiences of Latin America ... offer some general lessons for countries in other parts of the world. These lessons relate to changes in labor market incentives accompanying reforms and how workers react to them, government actions that have met with success in managing the transition to funded pensions, and the expectations of individuals from social security systems. Latin America's reforms suggest that the most effective approach is to keep payroll taxes low, governments solvent, and social security systems focused on providing reasonable insurance against poverty in old age.

Research Paper: ERISA Preemption and Fair Share Legislation

Excerpt: This paper addresses the issues states face in creating healthcare initiatives for their citizens. The preemption provisions of ERISA have presented a formidable obstacle to the implementation of these laws. The paper offers some alternatives and proposals which could possibly minimize the effect of preemption.