Defined Contribution Pension Plans and Retirement Wealth Adequacy

This document is about analyzing the use of a newly developed defined contribution (DC) pension wealth calculator to generate new estimates of DC pension wealth for individuals in the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) with employer-provided pension Summary Plan Descriptions (SPD). The key findings are that the calculator yields substantially lower mean estimates of DC pension wealth compared to previous methods, indicating that prior analyses using HRS pension wealth data may have overstated retirement wealth adequacy among HRS participants. The report discusses the economic assumptions and modeling approaches underlying the pension wealth calculations and the implications for research on retirement savings and wealth.