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In recent years, there has been a growing angst about the state over retirement security. What seemed a golden age of retirement 15 years ago has become increasingly costly and precarious, and there is limited understanding of the underlying causes for the changing environment. The discussion here explores the evolution of public policies and demographics that have driven the different experience of successive generations under both Social Security and employer-sponsored pensions. Social Security has become much more expensive and less efficient over time because it is financed on a pay-as-you-go basis. Employer-sponsored pension costs have exploded in recent years because we largely deferred the funding of the baby boom generation’s retirement benefits to the latter part of their working lives. This result was driven by a combination of policy appetites to keep income tax rates low and variations in financial market performance. The need to bring new policies to bear on our situation is delineated, and a description of potential policies to address current and future generations’ income security is provided.

The study investigated the influence of gender on teachers’ self-efficacy in public secondary schools of Kisumu County, Kenya. Bandura’s (1989) Social Cognitive Theory guided the study. The study employed the mixed methods approach within which a concurrent triangulation design was used. The target population was 1790 teachers in 143 public secondary schools from which a sample size of 327 teachers was drawn using stratified random sampling. Questionnaires and interview schedule were used to collect data. Piloting helped to clarify the test items, determine construct validity (r = 0.564 for items expected to have similar responses and r = -0.325 for items expected to have different responses) and establish internal reliability (Cronbach’s α = 0.9976). Two experts in Educational Psychology established face validity of the data collection instruments. Qualitative data was transcribed verbatim and analyzed thematically while quantitative data was analyzed using descriptive statistics and Multivariate Analysis of Variance (MANOVA). The MANOVA results revealed that there was no statistically significant influence of gender on teachers’ self-efficacy, but the qualitative results revealed that gender had an influence on self-efficacy of teachers in co-educational and Boys’ schools. The study recommended that teacher counsellors be empowered to counsel female teachers on the challenges of teaching in co-educational and Boys’ schools. DOI: 10.5901/ajis.2015.v4n3p189

The study investigated the influence of marital status on teachers’ self-efficacy in public secondary schools of Kisumu County, Kenya. Concurrent Triangulation Design was adopted to collect quantitative and qualitative data from samples of 327 students and 12 teachers. The interview schedule and questionnaire were piloted with 2 and 33 teachers respectively, who did not participate in the survey. Piloting helped to clarify the test items, determine construct validity (r = 0.564 for items expected to have similar responses and r = -0.325 for items expected to have different responses) and two experts in Educational Psychology established face validity of the research instruments. Internal reliability was established at Cronbach’s α = 0.9976. Multivariate Analysis of Variance (MANOVA) was used to analyze data from questionnaire. The quantitative findings revealed that marital status had no statistically significant influence on teachers’ self-efficacy while the qualitative findings revealed that marital status had an influence on teachers’ self-efficacy. The study recommends the employment of counsellors in schools to help teachers to deal with psychosocial and domestic issues. DOI: 10.5901/ajis.2015.v4n3p115

Virtually all state and local government employers in the United States offer workers some sort of retirement benefits today but there is significant variation in the characteristics of those plans. There is also a great deal of public angst about the level and timing of commitments made in these plans. The literature on retirement plans suggests that they are important elements of compensation that plan sponsors use in meeting their human resource goals. But public retirement plans are created and operated in a public policy environment and forces other than local labor market considerations may be brought to bear in the organization and operation of these plans. This paper explores some of the possible explanations for the variation in state retirement plans. Public disclosure data is used to develop a model that explains relative generosity of benefits based on the characteristics of participants and the marketplaces in which the plans are offered. The final section of the paper places the issues explored in a forward looking context. The public disclosure environment recently put in place for public retirement plans is likely to have a more profound effect on state pension operations than any other development in recent history.

Financial advisors commonly use earnings replacement rates to assist workers in their retirement planning. Policymakers and analysts use them to gauge the adequacy of Social Security benefits and other retirement income in allowing retirees to maintain preretirement living standards. In recent years, the Social Security trustees have regularly published replacement rates that have been widely interpreted as the extent to which Social Security benefits replace earnings of workers at various points in the lifetime earnings distribution. However, the trustees’ replacement rates are calculated differently than those generally used for retirement planning purposes, possibly leading to confusion among policymakers and others regarding how much of workers’ earnings are replaced by Social Security and how much those workers need to save on their own for retirement. Financial planners calculate replacement rates by comparing an individual’s retirement income to that same individual’s preretirement earnings, generally earnings in the years immediately preceding retirement. The Social Security Administration, by contrast, effectively calculates replacement rates by comparing retiree incomes to the incomes of contemporaneous workers. This latter measure is often used in other countries but differs both qualitatively and quantitatively from the more common replacement-rate calculations used for financial planning purposes. We find that replacement rates calculated on a financial planning basis are generally higher than those published by the Social Security trustees and that Social Security benefits generally replace somewhat more of individual workers’ earnings than the trustees’ rates suggest.

Over the past 15 to 20 years, many companies have converted their traditional defined benefit plans to cash balance or pension equity plans. In a cash balance plan, the worker's ‘account’ is based on an annual contribution rate for each year of employment, plus accumulating interest on annual contributions. A pension equity plan defines the benefit as a percentage of final average earnings for each year of service under the plan. Both types of plans specify the benefit as a lump sum payable at termination. In contrast, traditional defined benefit plans specify benefits in terms of an annuity payable at retirement. From the employees' perspective, cash balance and pension equity plans look somewhat like defined contribution plans. However, they are funded, administered, and regulated as defined benefit plans.

During the period from the middle of 2000 through to the end of 2002, the declining value in financial assets and falling interest rates raised questions about the funding status of employer-sponsored pensions in the USA. A number of large plan sponsors declared bankruptcy and turned over significantly underfunded plans to the government's pension insurance agency. Because the insurance of benefits is limited, many retirees whose benefits were transferred to the insurance agency saw their pension annuities reduced. Most plan sponsors with ongoing plans saw their pension programmes dip from being ‘fully funded’ under government rules to being underfunded. The director of the pension insurance programme has raised concerns about the viability of the insurance system because of recently absorbed plans and the prospect of additional underfunded plans being dumped onto the government system. This combination of events has led many to conclude there is a private pension funding crisis. The analysis presented here looks at the underlying funding status of private pensions in the USA and the root causes of alarm. It concludes that most plans are not in jeopardy but that there are some chronically underfunded plans threatened by recent events. It suggests that the public regulation of these particular plans might deserve further review to ensure that the current problem is rectified in coming years to restore faith in the existing system.

Virtually everyone familiar with U.S. Social Security financing understands that the system cannot pay currently legislated benefits for more than another three or four decades without significant, probably politically unacceptable, tax increases. Some analysts predict that the cash crunch will come substantially sooner than that. Various ways to measure the financial inadequacy of the system are outlined in recent annual reports of the Social Security Trustees. However, all reasonable measures of the system’s finances lead to the same fundamental conclusion that the system’s benefits and revenue sources must be significantly rebalanced. The only issue is when the necessary policy changes should be imposed. Even if one takes the most favorable perspective on the long-term funding situation of Social Security, it is important to consider the lead time necessary to minimize the disruptive effects that rebalancing the system could have on future beneficiaries or taxpayers. The most recent intermediate or “best guess” estimate of the Trustees is that the combined OASDI trust funds will be completely exhausted in 2042 under current law, although their most conservative estimate suggests that the trust funds could be depleted by 2031. When the trust funds are exhausted, dramatic adjustments to benefit payments or trust-fund revenues will be required. If we assume that the system continues to operate under current law until the trust funds are depleted, the latest projections are that at the time of exhaustion benefits would have to be cut by more than one-third for all beneficiaries then retired and all future beneficiaries in order to bring the system back into balance (U.S. Board of Trustees, 2003). Alternatively, dramatic payroll tax increases would have to be imposed on workers. To wait to make adjustments until this problem is upon us would be grossly unfair to the beneficiaries and/or workers at that time. In response to this situation, one of the proposed reform options put forward by the president’s Commission to Strengthen Social Security (2001) featured a modification in the way retirement benefits would be calculated in the future. Given the Social Security Trustees’ current intermediate assumption that average wages will grow 1.1 percent per year faster than the overall price level, current law implies that the Social Security benefits of people retiring 40 years from now will be roughly 55-percent higher in terms of purchasing power than the benefits of today’s retirees. One of the options put forward by the President’s Commission was to eliminate this growth in real benefits by shifting from determining initial benefits by wageindexing prior earnings to price-indexing them after 2009. Under this policy real benefit levels would be maintained but not increased. This change in indexing alone would completely eliminate the funding deficit now faced by the system over the 75-year projection period employed by its actuaries (Commission to Strengthen Social Security, 2001). In fact, the system would be running a substantial surplus at the end of the 75-year window. The net effect of substituting price indexing for wage indexing would be to gradually reduce Social Security benefits relative to a worker’s lifetime wages. The average replacement rate of Social Security would gradually fall from its current level of 43 percent. Just to be clear, real benefits would not be reduced from their current level under this President’s Commission alternative, but they would be reduced relative to wages and relative to what is currently promised future retirees by the law. Future real benefit increases, which are embedded in current legislation if wages rise faster than prices, would be eliminated. An across-the-board reduction in legislated or promised benefits of this sort would have * Pozen: Harvard Law School, Griswold 304, Cambridge, MA 02138; Schieber: Watson Wyatt Worldwide, 1717 H Street, N.W., Washington, DC 20006; Shoven: Department of Economics, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305.

The tax benefits accorded employer-sponsored pension retirement plans are often criticized because of the magnitude of the revenue costs to the federal treasury and the skewed distribution of the benefits provided to higher earners. The estimates of the value of the tax preferences often ignore the embedded future taxes in accumulating balances during workers’ careers as acknowledged in annual federal budgets. In addition, federal budgets for the past three decades have regularly acknowledged that the inflationary returns on retirement savings assets are “negative tax expenditures” but have never included estimates of the implications of netting these out of the official estimates. Finally, the estimates of costs of tax preferences accorded retirement plans ignore that these are interlinked with another element of federal taxation and benefit policy, namely Social Security. When all these factors are included in assessing the benefits that accrue to retirement savers, the net benefits that accrue even to many highly-compensated workers by the whole federal tax and benefit structure affecting retirement plans turns out to be much smaller than generally estimated and are likely negative for workers from one to two times maximum taxable earnings under the Social Security payroll tax who have typical saving and investment patterns.

Several recent assessments suggest that the majority of U.S. workers are at risk of having inadequate resources to maintain their work-life standards of living in retirement. These assessments are often based on models that fail to reflect patterns of income, consumption and savings that vary over workers’ life cycles. They extrapolate younger workers’ observed savings behavior into the future ignoring workers’ capacity to catch up after children leave home, the mortgage is paid off, and other early-life obligations have been discharged. The measurement of preretirement income and its spendable portion as an indicator of living standard in working years is often exaggerated owing to inappropriate indexing. This leads to overestimates of earnings to be replaced in retirement, underestimates of the income replacement capacity of Social Security for various segments of the workforce, and misperceptions about workers’ own responsibility for securing their retirement prospects. Although clearly some workers are not saving sufficiently to maintain their standards of living throughout retirement, the situation is less dire than a number of studies have suggested. This general conclusion still holds with a sensible consideration of health care costs.

The virtual classroom and distance education have created new teaching pedagogy. This study was carried out toinvestigate Virtual Classroom Instruction on Academic Performance of Educational Technology Students inDistance Education, Enugu State. The population for this study was limited to the Students in National OpenUniversity, Enugu study Centre. Simple random sampling technique was used to select forty respondents from theeducational technology students. A researcher developed questionnaire was used to gather the needed data. Collecteddata were analyzed using frequency counts and percentage. The findings from this paper suggested that the students’acknowledged that the availability and use of virtual classroom influenced their academic performance. Although thevirtual classroom available was adequate, it was not often utilized for instruction. Thus, the researcher recommendedthat the virtual classroom should be utilized for maximum learning.

There is a growing awareness of the aging of populations around the world and the implications for national retirement programs. In most cases, estimates of population aging are based on fixed assumptions about fertility, improvements in life expectancy, and immigration. In most countries, however, these factors have varied considerably in recent decades. In this analysis, the authors use population projections in the G-7 countries that capture historical patterns of fertility, longevity, and immigration and variability in those patterns over time. They find that many developed countries may be underestimating the extent of population aging they are facing and the policy changes necessary to deal with it.

The strong link between health insurance and employment in the United States may cause workers to delay retirement until they become eligible for Medicare at age 65. However, some employers extend health insurance benefits to their retirees, and individuals who are eligible for such retiree health benefits need not wait until age 65 to retire with group health coverage. We investigate the impact of retiree health insurance on early retirement using employee-level data from 54 diverse firms that are clients of Towers Watson, a leading benefits consulting firm. We find that retiree health coverage has its strongest effects at ages 62 through 64. Coverage that includes an employer contribution is associated with a 6.3 percentage point (36.2 percent) increase in the probability of turnover at age 62, a 7.7 percentage point (48.8 percent) increase in the probability of turnover at age 63, and a 5.5 percentage point (38.0 percent) increase in the probability of turnover at age 64. Conditional on working at age 57, such coverage reduces the expected retirement age by almost three months and reduces the total number of person-years worked between ages 58 and 64 by 5.6 percent.