Review of Living with Defined Contribution Pensions (Pension Research Council Publications) (Hardcover)

Reviewed in Journal of Financial Service Professionals - 01/01/2000:

Individuals serious about understanding the personal, corporate, and societal impacts of the shift toward defined contributionpensions should read Olivia Mitchell and Sylvester Schieber's Living withDefined Contribution Pensions: Remaking Responsibility for Retirement. Thebook is a compilation of the work of today's premier researchers onpensions. ...The articles in each part provide insight into many of the majorissues ... along with a wealth of current data in support of the analysis.Examples include but are not limited to questions such as the following: What factors influence employees to contribute to plans? How financiallyliterate are employees? Why do some employees spend, rather than roll overdefined contribution pension amounts when they change jobs? What are thetrends in defined contribution pension services? What policy options wouldspur more savings by employees?What is the future of the definedcontribution revolution?

The book's major strength is its superbintegration of corporate and personal financial planning, pension, andpolitical issues.Understanding pension behaviors and trends requires amultidisciplinary approach. One particularly distinctive contribution ofMitchell and Schieber's editorial work is that the corporate issues havenot been relegated to the background. Employer incentives are relevant topension trends; to ignore business issues is to have a very incompletepicture. The articles in this book give the necessary attention to thenexus of corporate issues surrounding the core trend toward a shift todefined contribution plans both in the United States and abroad.

Don'texpect to digest one of these articles in five minutes. This book is fullof thought provoking, rigorous work aimed at those individuals with somebackground in economics and statistics. ...The incentives and policyimplications are complex, and the analysis and discussion in this bookreflect this challenge. But for those seriously interested in providingpension services, advising others about pensions, or understanding thetrends for their own retirement needs, taking the time to read andcomprehend the issues in Living with Defined Contributions Pensions:Remaking Responsibility for Retirement is definitely a worthwhile endeavor.



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