Jack L. VanDerhei, Ph.D., CEBS
Jack VanDerhei is the research director of the Employee Benefit Research Institute. Previously, he was on the faculty of The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania for eight years where he served as research director of the Pension Research Council. Dr. VanDerhei has more than 150 publications devoted to employee benefits and insurance but his major areas of research focus on the financial aspects of private defined benefit and defined contribution retirement plans. He is currently analyzing a database with annual observations since 1996 of over 25 million 401(k) participants from more than 50,000 plans. This has already resulted in publications with respect to:
Future publications will begin to exploit the longitudinal nature of the database. He has also constructed a simulation model to forecast future retirement income for birth cohorts between 1935 and 1975. This model has already been used to help individual states predict the percentage of retirees (by age, gender and family status) that will have inadequate income to provide for specific post-retirement purchases (such as housing and health care expenditures). He has also used the model to forecast the probable financial impact of modifying the existing system with respect to company stock in 401(k) plans. Portions of this analysis were used in his testimony to the House Education and the Workforce Committee's Subcommittee on Employer-Employee Relations and further refinements were included in his testimony to the Senate Finance Committee and the House Ways and Means Committee. He has also used the model to demonstrate the importance of pooling longevity risk for the June 2003 Congressional Hearing on Strengthening Pension Security: Examining the Health and Future of Defined Benefit Pension Plans. Most recently he has expanded the model to provide national estimates of retirement adequacy as well as estimates of additional savings rates that would be required to ensure adequacy at various confidence levels. He has presented the results of these simulations at the January 2004 U.S. Senate Special Committee on Aging Hearing on Retirement Planning: Do We Have A Crisis In America? In 2008 he was named by Treasury & Risk as one of the 100 Most Influential People in Finance. He has won the American Risk and Insurance Association award for the best feature article in the Journal of Risk and Insurance for "An Empirical Analysis of PBGC Premiums under the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1987" and the James S. Kemper Foundation Award for the best feature article in the Risk Management and Insurance Review for "Potential Consequences for Employers of Social Security Privatization: Public Policy Research Implications" (with Kelly A. Olsen) In 1998 he was ranked as the second most prolific author in the Journal of Risk and Insurance for the past decade (L. Lee Colquitt, Randy E. Dumm and Sandra G. Gustavson, Risk and Insurance Research Productivity: 1987-1996, Journal of Risk and Insurance, 1998, Vol. 65, No. 4, 711-741.) He is the editor of Benefits Quarterly and Search for a National Retirement Income Policy (University of Pennsylvania Press), a member of the National Academy of Social Insurance, a member of the Board of Outside Scholars for the University of Michigan Retirement Research Center and on the Advisory Boards of the Pension Research Council at the Wharton School and the Financial Engines National 401(k) Evaluation. He was a co-author of the sixth, seventh and eighth editions of Pension Planning: Pension, Profit-Sharing, and Other Deferred Compensation Plans (Irwin/McGraw-Hill). Dr. VanDerhei has served as a consultant for the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, the U.S. Department of Labor, the International Foundation of Employee Benefit Plans and the International Society of Certified Employee Benefit Specialists program as well as several employee benefit consulting firms and corporate plan sponsors. He has also served as an expert witness in litigation focusing on plan sponsor liability issues for participant directed 401(k) plans as well as asset reversion issues. Dr. VanDerhei was recently featured on the PBS Frontline special: Can You Afford to Retire? He has appeared on NBC Nightly News, CNN, CNBC and NPR's All Things Considered and has been quoted in major news publications including:
He has made numerous presentations on retirement security topics for academic as well as national professional conferences and is often called upon to provide briefings for Hill staffers and research staff for federal agencies. He has also served on or consulted for a number of working groups involved in overseeing the development of pension simulation models in Washington. Dr. VanDerhei developed the original Continuing Education course for the International Society of Certified Employee Benefit Specialists in 1982 and developed new course material on an annual basis until 1995. During that same period of time, he had the primary responsibility for developing all pension-related material for the Certified Employee Benefit Specialists program as well as the capstone course. He received his BBA and MBA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. |
