Study

A coalition of unions and employers is proposing changes to the federal law that governs the pension plans of about 10 million people, including reducing benefits paid to retirees, the first time in four decades that such cuts would be allowed.

Nearly four in 10 employers with defined benefit plans say they are at least somewhat likely to offer terminated vested participants and/or retirees a lump-sum option during a specified time period in 2013, compared with 7 percent that actually made such a move in 2012, according to survey results released Feb. 13 by Aon Hewitt.

More than a third of adults near retirement age — 35 percent — said last year that they simply don’t expect to retire. That was up from just 29 percent two years earlier.

Bob Litan, formerly of the Kauffman Foundation and the Brookings Institution, has recently taken up a new job as director of research for Bloomberg Government, where he’s going to have to be transparent and impartial. But one of his last gigs before moving to Bloomberg — a paper on the subject of people borrowing money from their 401(k) accounts — was neither of those things.