The Market for Retirement Financial Advice
Olivia S. Mitchell and Kent Smetters
The long-term shift away from traditional defined benefit pensions toward defined contribution personal accounts requires all of us to be more sophisticated today than ever before. However, the landscape for financial advice is changing all over the world, with new rules and regulations transforming the financial advice profession.
This volume explores the market for retirement financial advice, to explain what financial advisors do and how to measure performance and impact. Who are these professionals and what standards must they abide by? How do they make money and what are their incentives? How can one protect clients from bad advice, and what is good advice? Does advice alone effect changes in personal habits? Answering these questions, along with new technology that will decrease the delivery costs of advice, will play a transformative role in helping more households receive the quality financial advice that they need. Accordingly, this volume illuminates the market and regulatory challenges so as to enhance consumer, plan sponsor, and regulator decisions.
About the Authors
Olivia S. Mitchell
Dr. Olivia S. Mitchell is the International Foundation of Employee Benefit Plans Professor, as well as Professor of Insurance/Risk Management and Business Economics/Policy; Executive Director of the Pension Research Council; and Director of the Boettner Center on Pensions and Retirement Research; all at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Her main areas of interest are private and public insurance, risk management, public finance, labour markets, compensation, and pensions with both a US and an international focus. She is a Re ... More
Kent Smetters
Kent Smetters is the Boettner Chair Professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Besides being a professor in Business Economics and Public Policy, he is also professor of Insurance and Risk Management as well as a faculty member in Applied Mathematics and Computational Science at the University of Pennsylvanian. His research focuses on applied theory, fiscal policy, risk measurement, insurance, health care, and personal finance. ... More