Recreating Sustainable Retirement ― Resilience, Solvency, and Tail Risk

The financial crisis and the ensuing Great Recession alerted those seeking to protect old-age security, about the extreme risks confronting the financial and political institutions comprising our retirement system.

The workforce of today and tomorrow must count on longer lives and deferred retirement, while at the same time it is taking on increased responsibility for managing retirement risk. This volume explores new ways to think about, manage, and finance longevity risk, capital market risk, model risk, and regulatory risk.

The book offers an in-depth analysis of the 'black swans' that threaten private and public pensions around the world such as capital market shocks, surprises to longevity, regulatory/political risk, and errors in modelling, will all have profound consequences for stakeholders ranging from pension plan participants, plan sponsors, policymakers, and those who seek to make retirement more resistant. This book analyzes such challenges to retirement sustainability, and it explores ways to better manage and finance them. Insights provided help build retirement systems capable of withstanding what the future will bring.

Olivia S. Mitchell, International Foundation of Employee Benefit Plans Professor of Business Economics/Public Policy and Insurance/Risk Management, Director of the Boettner Center for Pensions and Retirement Research, and Executive Director of the Pension Research Council, Wharton School,Raimond Maurer, Chair of Investment, Portfolio Management, and Pension Finance in the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, Goethe University of Frankfurt,Brett Hammond,Managing Director and Head of Index Applied Research, MSCI Inc

Olivia S. Mitchell is International Foundation of Employee Benefit Plans Professor of Insurance/Risk Management, Professor of Business Economics/Public Policy, Executive Director of the Pension Research Council, and Director of the Boettner Center for 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 Health and Retirement Study 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 her B.A. in Economics from Harvard University and her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Economics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Raimond Maurer holds the endowed Chair of Investment, Portfolio Management, and Pension Finance in the Finance Department at the Goethe University of Frankfurt. His research focuses on asset management, life-time portfolio choice, and pension finance. He serves in professional capacities for the Society of Actuaries, the Association of Certified International Investment Analysts, and the Advisory Board of the Wharton School's Pension Research Council. He received his habilitation, his Ph.D., and his Diploma in business from Mannheim University.


P. Brett Hammond, Jr. is the Managing Director and Head of Index Applied Research at MSCI Inc.