Financial Decision Making and Retirement

As the world's population lives longer, it will become increasingly important for plan sponsors, retirement advisors, regulators, and financial firms to focus closely on how older persons fare in the face of rising difficulties with cognition and financial management.

This book offers state-of-the-art research and recommendations on how to evaluate when older persons need financial advice, help them make better financial decisions, and to identify policy options for handling these individual and social challenges efficiently and fairly. This latest volume in the Pension Research Council series, draws lessons from theory and practice, and will be of interest to employees and retirees, consumers and researchers, and financial institutions working to design better retirement plan offerings.

Olivia S. Mitchell is the International Foundation of Employee Benefit Plans Professor, Professor of Insurance and Risk Management and Business Economics and Public Policy, Executive Director of the Pension Research Council, and Director of the Boettner Center for Pensions and Retirement Research, all at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Professor Mitchell's main interests are public and private pensions, insurance, and risk management, financial literacy, and social insurance. She received her MA and PhD degrees in Economics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and her BA in Economics from Harvard University.

P. Brett Hammond is Research Leader of the Client Analytics Group at the Capital Group. His research interests include finance, higher education, and public policy. Previously, he served as Managing Director and Head of Multi-Asset Class Applied Research at MSCI, Chief Investment Strategist at TIAA-CREF, and on the staff of The National Academies, and he was a member of the UCLA faculty. He received BA degrees in Economics and Political Science from the University of California at Santa Cruz and the Ph.D. from MIT. He is also Program Chair and Executive VP of the Institute for Research in Quantitative Finance (Q Group).

Stephen P. Utkus is principal and director of the Vanguard Center for Retirement Research; he is also a member of the senior leadership team of Vanguard's institutional retirement business in the U.S. The Center conducts and sponsors research on retirement savings in the United States. Mr. Utkus is also a Visiting Scholar at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and he is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Employee Benefit Research Institute. He earned the MBA from the Wharton School.