Staying Afloat in a Sea of Pension Numbers

Dean Michael Mead, Marcia Van Wagner and Donald J. Boyd

Municipal Finance Journal, 2015, vol. 35, issue 4, 1 - 27

Abstract: Recent years have witnessed a spate of new numbers, some of them contradictory, about the funding status of state and local government pension plans. Why do pension plans look better funded according to some numbers and worse according to others? Rather than being more or less accurate than one another, each set of numbers emphasizes different aspects of pension finances with potential value to analysts. This article explains how pension numbers are calculated by financial economists and rating agencies, under the old as well as the new pension accounting standards, and it highlights the valuable insights that can be gleaned from each.

Date: 2015
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/MFJ35040001 (application/pdf)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/MFJ35040001 (text/html)
Access to the online full text or PDF requires a subscription.

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:ucp:munifj:doi:10.1086/mfj35040001

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Municipal Finance Journal from University of Chicago Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Journals Division ().