The Market for Retirement Financial Advice

The market for retirement financial advice has never been more important and yet more in flux. The long-term shift away from traditional defined benefit pensions toward defined contribution personal accounts requires all of us to be more sophisticated today than ever before. However, the landscape for financial advice is changing all over the world, with new rules and regulations transforming the financial advice profession.

This volume explores the market for retirement financial advice, to explain what financial advisors do and how to measure performance and impact. Who are these professionals and what standards must they abide by? How do they make money and what are their incentives? How can one protect clients from bad advice, and what is good advice? Does advice alone effect changes in personal habits? Answering these questions, along with new technology that will decrease the delivery costs of advice, will play a transformative role in helping more households receive the quality financial advice that they need. Accordingly, this volume illuminates the market and regulatory challenges so as to enhance consumer, plan sponsor, and regulator decisions.

Olivia S. Mitchell, International Foundation of Employee Benefit Plans Professor, Professor of Insurance/Risk Management and Business Economics/Policy, and Director, Pension Research Council & Boettner Center for Pensions and Retirement Research, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania,Kent Smetters, Boettner Chair Professor, the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania

Olivia S. Mitchell is Department Chair and International Foundation of Employee Benefit Plans Professor of Insurance and Risk Management, and Professor of Business and Public Policy, as well as Director of the Pension Research Council and the Boettner Center on Pensions and Retirement Research at the Wharton School. Concurrently Dr. Mitchell is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a Co-Investigator for the AHEAD/Health and Retirement Studies at the University of Michigan. Her main areas of research and teaching are pensions, insurance and risk management, public finance and labor markets, with an international focus. She received the B.A. in Economics from Harvard University and the M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Economics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Kent Smetters is the Boettner Chair Professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School and a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. His research examines incomplete markets, investment risk management, and the interaction of risk management and public policy. Previously, he worked at the Congressional Budget Office and served as Economics Policy Coordinator for the US Treasury. He received his Bachelor's degrees in Economics and Computer Science from The Ohio State University and his Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University.