Retirement Wealth Accumulation and Decumulation: New Developments and Outstanding Opportunities

Analysts have raised serious questions about current workers' ability and inclination to save enough for retirement. This is of obvious policy interest given the need to reform national retirement income programs. In the present paper we examine recent research developments regarding retirement wealth accumulation and decumulation. Our goal is to identify new developments and outstanding opportunities to encourage a more sensible process of growing and then drawing down retirement wealth.

Projected Retirement Wealth and Savings Adequacy in the Health and Retirement Study

Low saving rates raise questions about Americans' ability to maintain consumption levels in old age. Using the Health and Retirement Study, this paper explores asset holdings among a nationally representative sample of people on the verge of retirement. Making reasonable projections about asset growth, we assess how much more people would need to save in order to preserve consumption levels after retirement. We find that the median older household has current wealth of approximately $325,000 including pensions, social security, housing, and other financial wealth, an amount projected to grow to about$380,000 by retirement at age 62. Nevertheless, our model suggests that this median household will still need to save 16% of annual earnings to preserve pre-retirement consumption. For retirement at age 65, assets are expected to be about $420,000 and required additional saving totals 7% of earnings per year. These summary statistics conceal extraordinary heterogeneity in both assets and saving needs in the older population. Older high wealth households have 45 times more assets than the poorest decile and this disparity increases with age. There are also large differences in prescribed saving targets, ranging from 38% of annual earnings for those in the lowest wealth decile to negative rates for the wealthiest decile.

Retirement Wealth Accumulation and Decumulation: New Developments and Outstanding Opportunities

Analysts have raised questions about current workers' ability and inclination to save" enough for retirement. This issue is of obvious policy interest given the current debate over" reforming national retirement income programs. This paper explores the implications of recent" research regarding retirement wealth accumulation and decumulation for this debate. Our goal is" to identify problems and opportunities in the area of preparedness for retirement."

Use of Remote Surface Based Tools for Visualizing Integrated Brain Imaging Data

We describe a surface-based approach to 3D visualization of integrated neuroimaging data. Our web-enabled software allows researchers to use these visualization tools over the Internet. We present examples of brain imaging studies where such remote surface-based visualization techniques have proven to be quite effective

Brain Visualization in Java3D

BrainJ3D is a cross-platform Java/Java3D software toolkit for processing and visualizing brain imaging data, which 1) contains general purpose tools for reconstructing, mapping and visualizing integrated structural and functional images and 2) leverages Java's Remote Method Invocation to provide both a standalone and a client/server mode

Tail Estimation and Catastrophe Security Pricing: Can We Tell What Target We Hit if We Are Shooting in the Dark?

The past few years have seen the development and growth of traded securities with payoffs tied to natural disasters. With this comes a need for tools to evaluate the underlying risks involved. Pricing the insurance features imbedded in these securities is difficult and imprecise. This lack of pricing precision translates into greater required return premiums to holders of these securities This paper explores the nature of pricing uncertainty for a number of data sets, security designs, and loss distributions using mathematical techniques for assessing small-sample variance. Specifically the techniques applied are known as "jackknife" and "bootstrap" and where invented by the statistician John Tukey in the 1950's. The paper contains nearly 50 tables and graphs detailing the findings. Finally, the economic impact of pricing uncertainty is then briefly explored. It is shown that while differences between distribution assumption may not generate statistically significant differences in loss estimates, the economic difference in prices that these different distributions generate is large. The author asserts that while reinsurers will currently place "big bets" based on relatively small amounts of information, it will become more important to develop better understanding of the actual size of these risks as issuers seek to spread them to more entities through the capital markets. He concludes that the more confidently we can state what the price of a risky security "should" be, the more attractive these securities will become and the more successful they will be as investments and means of sharing risk.

Fatigue testing a plurality of test specimens and method

Described is a fatigue testing apparatus for simultaneously subjecting a plurality of material test specimens to cyclical tension loading to determine the fatigue strength of the material. The fatigue testing apparatus includes a pulling head having cylinders defined therein which carry reciprocating pistons. The reciprocation of the pistons is determined by cyclical supplies of pressurized fluid to the cylinders. Piston rods extend from the pistons through the pulling head and are attachable to one end of the test specimens, the other end of the test specimens being attachable to a fixed base, causing test specimens attached between the piston rods and the base to be subjected to cyclical tension loading. Because all the cylinders share a common pressurized fluid supply, the breaking of a test specimen does not substantially affect the pressure of the fluid supplied to the other cylinders nor the tension applied to the other test specimens

Time, action and psychosis: using subjective time to investigate the effects of ketamine on sense of agency

Sense of agency refers to the experience of initiating and controlling actions in order to influence events in the outside world. A disturbed sense of agency is found in certain psychiatric and neurological disorders, most notably schizophrenia. Sense of agency is associated with a subjective compression of time: actions and their outcomes are perceived as bound together in time. This is known as ‘intentional binding’ and, in healthy adults, depends partly on advance prediction of action outcomes. Notably, this predictive contribution is disrupted in patients with schizophrenia. In the present study we aimed to characterise the psychotomimetic effect of ketamine, a drug model for psychosis, on the predictive contribution to intentional binding. It was shown that ketamine produced a disruption that closely resembled previous data from patients in the early, prodromal, stage of schizophrenic illness. These results are discussed in terms of established models of delusion formation in schizophrenia. The link between time and agency, more generally, is also considered