Investment and Funding

From Wikipension

In June 2012 Moody's Investor Service issued a Request for Comment on adjustments to pension cost and liability information reported by States, designed to increase comparability between them.

From Abstract: "This document (“Considerations”) provides guidance regarding the application of the federal securities laws to the preparation of official statement disclosure addressing the pension funding obligations of state and local governments to their public defined benefit pension plans"

This special report discusses new metrics for calculating and comparing state pension liabilities.

Robert Novy-Marx and Joshua Rauh – whose analysis last year contained flawed methods reflecting an inaccurate understanding of public sector finance and operations – released a new paper that makes more dramatic projections about the condition of public retirement systems and their effects on state taxes. The paper, The Revenue Demands of Public Employee Pension Promises, uses underlying assumptions that understate revenues, inflate costs, and ignore other available public policy options. As a result, the paper’s conclusions bear little resemblance to the actual practices of most state and local governments, or their pension plans, and again have limited application for policymakers wishing to address the financial impacts of the Great Recession.

A new NIRS research report examines selected statewide public pension plans to identify common elements of plans that remained well funded despite two severe economic downturns.