Pension Rights Center: Publications | Reports

Reports on Defined Contribution Plans

Fee Disclosure to Pension Participants: Establishing Minimum Requirements (International Centre for Pension Management, August 2008). Every year pension participants pay billions of dollars in fees. They need information concerning fees to make informed decisions about the services they are purchasing...This analysis of fee disclosure takes into account insights from behavioral economics in assessing the usefulness of different approaches...The report proposes a model fee disclosure. It creates a score card assessing the current fee disclosure in six countries: Australia, Canada, Chile, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Storm Clouds Ahead for 401(k) Plans? (Urban Institute, July 2008). Designed to promote retirement saving, the Pension Protection Act of 2006 clarified auto-enrollment, auto-contribution, and auto-investment rules in employer 401(k) plans. Early evidence suggests that the legislation boosted these plan features and increased employee participation in 401(k) plans. It is too soon to gauge the act's ultimate success, however, because it hinges on the number of new participants that will eventually amass substantial account balances.

Robbing Tomorrow to Pay for Today: Economically Squeezed Families Are Turning to Their 401(k)s to Make Ends Meet (Center for American Progress, July 2008). To reduce the likelihood of workers leveraging their retirement to cover current catastrophes, policymakers must reduce the need for people to borrow. Policy solutions will require substantial improvements to income growth for America’s families, and a commitment to providing health and unemployment insurance to citizens who experience unexpected health expenditures and job loss. To understand the need for such policy actions, this report considers the evidence on loans drawn from DC plans from 1989 to 2004, the last year for which complete data are available.

Private Pensions: Low Defined Contribution Plan Savings May Pose Challenges to Retirement Security, Especially for Many Low-Income Workers (Government Accountability Office, November 2007). This report addresses the following issues: (1) What percentage of workers participate in defined contribution (DC) plans, and how much have they saved in them? (2) How much are workers likely to have saved in DC plans over their careers and to what degree do key individual decisions and plan features affect plan saving? (3) What options have been recently proposed to increase DC plan coverage, participation, and savings?

Retirement Savings Accounts: Fees, Expenses, and Account Balances (Congressional Research Service, October 2007). For this report, CRS estimated the effect of 401(k) account expenses ranging from 0.4% to 2.0% of assets on the amounts accumulated in retirement accounts over a thirty-year period by married couples and single persons with high, median, and low earnings who contribute 6%, 8%, or 10% of earnings each year to a retirement account invested in a mix of stocks and bonds. We compared annual expenses of 0.8%, 1.2%, 1.6%, and 2.0% of plan assets to a low-cost “base case” in which annual expenses were equal to 0.4% of assets in the account.

Private Pension Plan Bulletin: Abstract of 2004 Form 5500 Annual Reports (Employee Benefits Security Administration, March 2007). This report, published annually, provides basic statistical data on the types of retirement plans offered, how many people participated in each type of plan, and the amount of assets in each type. The report also includes historical tables from 1975 to 2004.

Why Some Workers Don’t Take 401(k) Plan Offers: Inertia versus Economics (Center for Research on Pensions and Welfare Policies, February 2007). This paper examines workers who do not choose to participate in pension plans offered by their employers. It investigates reasons why workers do not participate, and in particular it investigates the role of inertia and similar behavioral explanations for nonparticipation.

Access, Participation, and Take-up Rates in Defined Contribution Retirement Plans among Workers in Private Industry, 2006 (Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor, December 2006). Employee participation rates for defined contribution retirement plans vary widely among groups of workers and their employers, primarily reflecting how frequently the employers provide access for employees to participate in these plans.

Private Pensions: Changes Needed to Provide 401(k) Plan Participants and the Department of Labor Better Information on Fees (Government Accountability Office, November 2006). Because of concerns about the effects of 401(k) fees on participants’ retirement savings, GAO examined (1) the types of fees associated with 401(k) plans and who pays these fees, (2) how information on fees is disclosed to plan participants, and (3) how the Department of Labor oversees plan fees and certain business arrangements.

401(k) Plan Asset Allocation, Account Balances, and Loan Activity in 2005 (ICI/EBRI, August 2006). This report serves as an update of EBRI and ICI’s ongoing research into 401(k) plan participants’ activity through year-end 2005. The report includes account balance information for participants who consistently maintained accounts between 1999 and 2005 and account balances, asset allocations, and loan activity for all 401(k) participants at year-end 2005.

Automatic Enrollment in 401(k) Plans (Congressional Research Service, August 2006). This brief summarizes the enrollment practices, IRS rulings, participation rates and policy issues surrounding automatic enrollment in 401(k) plans.

Retirement Plan Participation and Contributions: Trends from 1998 to 2003 (Congressional Research Service, October 2005). An analysis of data from the 2003 Survey of Income and Program Participation, measuring workers’ participation in employer-sponsored retirement plans from a nationally representative sample of American households.

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