Growing Old

While the immediate dangers from the recent financial crisis have abated ?much ofthe financial system has returned to profitability and the economy is growing, albeitslowly ?the damage to the economy will linger for years. Among the many impacts is theproblem that may be most acute in the United States: how state and local governments and private companies will honor their obligations under defined benefit (DB) pension plans. Institutional investors also confront new difficulties in the low-interest-rate environment that has prevailed since the onset of the crisis. East Asian economies, namely in Japan, Korea, and China, also face pension issues as their populations age.

In Growing Old, experts from academia and the private sector consider the hard questionsregarding the future of pension plans and institutional money management, both in theUnited States and in Asia. This volume is the latest collaboration between the BrookingsInstitution and the Nomura Institute of Capital Markets Research on issues confronting the financial sector of common interest to audiences in the United States and Japan.

Contributors: Olivia S. Mitchell (Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania), AkikoNomura (Nomura Institute of Capital Markets Research), Robert Novy-Marx (Simon Graduate School of Business, University of Rochester), Betsy Palmer (MFS Investment Management), Robert Pozen (Harvard Business School), Joshua Rauh (Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University), Natalie Shapiro (MFS Investment Management)

Yasuyuki Fuchita is a senior managing director at the Nomura Institute ofCapital Markets Research in Tokyo. He coedited the Brooking Institution Press books After the Crash (2010) and Prudent Lending Restored (2009) with Richard J. Herring andRobert E. Litan and Pooling Money (2008) with Litan.

Richard J. Herring is the Jacob Safra Professor of International Banking and professor of finance at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, where he is also codirector of the Wharton Financial Institutions Center.

Robert E. Litan is a senior fellow in Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution and vice president for research and policy at the Kauffman Foundation. His many books include Good Capitalism, Bad Capitalism, and the Economics of Growth and Prosperity (Yale University Press, 2007), written with William J. Baumol and Carl J. Schramm.