How Much Risk is Acceptable?

Alicia Munnell, Anthony Webb () and Alex Golub-Sass

Issues in Brief from Center for Retirement Research

Abstract: The financial crisis has sparked proposals to reform the retirement income system. One component of such a system could be a new tier of retirement accounts. These accounts would augment declining Social Security replacement rates for low-wage workers and provide a buffer of security for middle- and upper-wage workers who, increasingly, will rely totally on 401(k) plans to supplement their Social Security. Designing such a new tier requires answering a number of questions: Mandatory or voluntary? Employee and/or employer contributions? Subsidies for low earners? Payments as lump sums or annuities? Tax favored or not? But the most fundamental question is whether the goal of the new tier is to provide a defined contribution account, where the retirement income will depend on market performance, or an account that can provide a certain percent of final earnings ñ that is, a target replacement rate...

Pages: 9 pages
Date: 2008-11, Revised 2008-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://crr.bc.edu/briefs/how-much-risk-is-acceptable/
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 403 Forbidden (http://crr.bc.edu/briefs/how-much-risk-is-acceptable/ [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://crr.bc.edu/briefs/how-much-risk-is-acceptable/)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:crr:issbrf:ib2008-8-20

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Issues in Brief from Center for Retirement Research Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Amy Grzybowski () and Christopher F Baum ().