Living with Defined Contribution Pensions

Reviewed in Journal of Financial Service Professionals - 01/01/2000:Individuals serious about understanding the personal, corporate, and societal impacts of the shift toward defined contribution pensions should read Olivia Mitchell and Sylvester Schieber's Living with Defined Contribution Pensions: Remaking Responsibility for Retirement. The book is a compilation of the work of today's premier researchers on pensions. ...The articles in each part provide insight into many of the major issues ... along with a wealth of current data in support of the analysis. Examples include but are not limited to questions such as the following: What factors influence employees to contribute to plans? How financially literate are employees? Why do some employees spend, rather than roll over defined contribution pension amounts when they change jobs? What are the trends in defined contribution pension services? What policy options would spur more savings by employees? What is the future of the defined contribution revolution? The book's major strength is its superb integration of corporate and personal financial planning, pension, and political issues. Understanding pension behaviors and trends requires a multidisciplinary approach. One particularly distinctive contribution of Mitchell and Schieber's editorial work is that the corporate issues have not been relegated to the background. Employer incentives are relevant to pension trends; to ignore business issues is to have a very incomplete picture. The articles in this book give the necessary attention to the nexus of corporate issues surrounding the core trend toward a shift to defined contribution plans both in the United States and abroad. Don't expect to digest one of these articles in five minutes. This book is full of thought provoking, rigorous work aimed at those individuals with some background in economics and statistics. ...The incentives and policy implications are complex, and the analysis and discussion in this book reflect this challenge. But for those seriously interested in providing pension services, advising others about pensions, or understanding the trends for their own retirement needs, taking the time to read and comprehend the issues in Living with Defined Contributions Pensions: Remaking Responsibility for Retirement is definitely a worthwhile endeavor.