Center for Business and Public Policy
at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

My good friend Douglas Elliott, who is now a Fellow at the Brookings Institution, just issued a new paper “The Financial Crisis’ Effects on the Alternatives for Public Pensions.”  The paper is yet one more in a growing chorus of voices pointing out the significant fiscal woes facing our state and local pensions in the U.S.  And, as I have pointed out before, Illinois is the poster-child for everything that is wrong with the funding status of our public pensions.  

After reviewing the net losses on pension assets, Doug makes the following simple but astute observation:

“The situation is even worse than those figures show on the surface, because pension funds are essentially walking on a treadmill. They need to earn an expected return each year in order to stay standing in place, since the value in today’s dollars of the pensions they have promised to pay goes up each year as those payouts come closer in time. The situation is analogous to inflation. The public pension funds may have lost 15% over two years on a “nominal” basis, but, if their target return was 8% a year , they lost 31% compared to their targeted level of investment value, excluding the effects of contributions and pension payments.”

I have previously noted in this blog that the Government Accounting Standards Board (GASB) allows public pensions to discount future liabilities using the expected return on plan assets.  This approach has no basis whatsoever in financial market theory – indeed, I have yet to meet anyone with a PhD in economics or finance who believes such an approach is correct or sensible.  Actuaries and plan administrators often defend it, but when you dig below the surface, their defense is often rooted in the political or P.R. ramifications of reporting the true nature of the liabilities, rather than in any good economic reasoning.

Let’s bring this home to Illinois.  Specifically, let’s bring this home to the State Universities Retirement System, or SURS.

According to the SURS Investment Update (see page 3 here), the average annual return on the SURS Total Fund over the 10 years ending February 2010 was dismal 3.4%.  But SURS, in accordance with GASB, uses an expected return on assets that is more than double this amount.  Even worse, SURS credits participants in the old Money Purchase option with an investment return that is far greater than this.  Doing so amounts to an implicit transfer from Illinois taxpayers to Illinois pensioners that is above-and-beyond the standard pension formula. 

As we discuss pension reform in Illinois and other states, here are three related points that are worth considering:

1. We should start with truth in accounting.  Stop hiding behind high discount rates and let’s at least define the size of the problem honestly.  A starting point would be disclosing the size of the public pension liabilities discounted using something more akin to a risk-free rate.  (See here for discussion).
2. Let’s stop pretending that we can achieve higher returns without taking on higher risk.
3. Let’s stop making irrevocable transfers from taxpayers to pension participants on the basis of “average” or “expected” returns.  In SURS, that means bringing the Effective Rate of Interest way, way down from historical levels.   

In at least one previous post, as well as in other research papers and articles, I have discussed the enormous problems facing the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation (PBGC), the government corporation that insures private defined benefit pension plans.  This week, a very talented MBA student at Illinois – Gagan Bhatia – reminded me of a terrific idea that would go a very long way toward providing plan sponsors with economically appropriate incentives for funding their plans.  Right now, plan sponsors lack appropriate and sufficient incentives to fully fund their plan or to choose a portfolio that immunizes the plan funding from market risk.  Sure, the government imposes funding requirements, but they have proven woefully inadequate.

In fairness, while Gagan Bhatia came up with this idea on his own and independently, it is an idea that has been out there, including in some work by Doug Elliot of the Center on Federal Financial Institutions.  Regardless of who gets credit, I think it is a terrific idea.

In a nutshell, the idea is to increase the seniority of pension claims in the event of a bankruptcy.  When a company files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, the company’s creditors and claimants fall into different pools as per their priority over the company’s assets. PBGC’s obligations fall into the Unsecured Creditors pool which are paid after the Secured Creditors.   

Under this proposal, the PBGC would be moved up the line and be considered a senior, secured claim.  In essence, it would allow the PBGC to get paid first (or at least earlier than under current law) from any assets that the plan sponsor has remaining.

Why does this help?  Currently, creditors have insufficient incentive to consider the funding status of a firm’s pension plan when the firm is issuing debt.  If creditors knew that the PBGC’s claim on the firm’s assets was senior to that of the creditors, then creditors and potential creditors would become powerful enforcers of economically appropriate funding behavior.  Plan sponsors that failed to adequately fund their pension or plan sponsors who failed to engage in asset-liability matching would be considered – appropriately – to be a higher credit risk.  Thus, the firm would have to pay more to borrow.  Firms that funded their pensions and invested them in a manner that mitigated future funding risk would benefit from lower borrowing rates. 

In essence, this approach would harness market forces to achieve a worthwhile public policy goal.  Along the way, both pensioners and taxpayers would benefit. 

It is well-known that Illinois has one of the worst track records of funding its public pension plans of any state in the nation.  What is less well-known is that the problem is far, far worse than the official statistics would indicate: indeed, the extent of under-funding may be 2.5 times larger than what is typically reported!

To be clear, this is not because anyone in Illinois state government is doing anything unethical – those responsible for calculating the pension liabilities are presumably doing so in accordance with Government Accounting Standards Board (GASB) procedures.  Even so, there is near unanimity among economists (and yes, unanimity among economists is rare) that GASB rules themselves are deeply misguided. 

This is a complex topic, but I am going to over-simplify for brevity’s sake.  As noted in at least two prior posts, the Illinois state constitution provides a rock-solid guarantee that pension benefits will not be reduced or impaired in any way.  That makes the benefits that participants have accrued virtually risk-free.  It also means that it makes the liability to the State of Illinois risk-free.

Simple (and also advanced) finance theory is unambiguously clear that the appropriate way to discount a risk-free stream of cash flows is to use a risk-free interest rate.  While there is not a perfect risk-free asset available for this purpose, municipal bonds and U.S. treasury securities offer reasonable proxies.  (I have written on this subject in more depth in a paper with David Wilcox published in the American Economic Review, and I will simply refer readers there for a more in-depth discussion).

Instead of using this clear and rigorously grounded approach, GASB allows public pension plans to discount their liabilities using the expected rate of return on plan assets. There is not a shred of logic to this as an approach for valuing liabilities unless one believes that the liabilities share the exact same risk characteristics as the portfolio in which one is investing (and that is certainly not the case in Illinois.  We have riskless liabilities but invest in diversified portfolios of risky assets).

How big of a difference does this make?  A relatively new paper by Robert Novy-Marx (University of Chicago) and Joshua Rauh (Northwestern University) estimates the size of the liabilities when calculated using appropriate discount rates.  (Read their paper here).  What do they find?

In 2008, the four large public pension plans in Illinois had combined assets of $65.7 billion.  The combined liabilities of these four plans (calculated under flawed GASB rules) were $151.1 billion, for a shortfall of $85.4 billion.  

If one uses a more theoretically appropriate rate on treasury yields, the present value of the liabilities is $284.8 billion, for a shortfall of $219.1 billion!  That is more than 2.5 times greater than the official statistics indicate!

What do these numbers really mean?  If the state of Illinois wanted to be certain it had enough money set aside today so that it could meet all public pension benefit obligations that have already been accrued, it would need to set aside an additional $219.1 billion.  For perspective, that is about 1/3 of Illinois GDP, about 1/3 of state revenues, and about four times the outstanding state debt.   

Any amount less than this means that the state would have invest in riskier assets in order to fund the benefits, a strategy that might work … or might make the problem worse. 

We’ve all heard to old adage that the first thing to do when you find yourself in a deep hole is to stop digging.  In this case, we also need to stop denying just how deep the hole is. 

I’ve noted in prior postings that public pensioners in Illinois have very little to worry about with regard to their pension benefits.  But now the bad news – they do have reason to be concerned about retiree health insurance.

As I stated in a previous post, Article XIII, Section 5 of the Illinois state constitution protects pension benefits.  Specifically, it states:

“Membership in any pension or retirement system of the State, any unit of local government or school district, or any agency or instrumentality thereof, shall be an enforceable contractual relationship, the benefits of which shall not be diminished or impaired.”

That is about as strong of a guarantee as anyone could hope for in this day and age.  Indeed, Social Security offers no such guarantees.  The Supreme Court of the United States has previously (in 1960) ruled that individuals have no inherent “right” to their Social Security benefits (see Fleming v. Nestor).  Congress can alter them at anytime. 

But, the above guarantee is limited to the benefits from the retirement system, such as the Statue Universities Retirement System (SURS) or the Teachers’ Retirement System (TRS).  As much as participants might hope that retiree health insurance is a benefit of the retirement system, I (and, more importantly, most of the lawyers to whom I have posed this question) don’t think this argument would stand much of a chance in the courts. 

Of course, even in states that do not have explicit constitutional guarantees, retirement benefits are often protected by a contract clause.  And, yes, Illinois has one of those too.  Specifically, the Illinois constitution states:

“No ex post facto law, or law impairing the obligation of contracts or making an irrevocable grant of special privileges or immunities, shall be passed.”

I have asked a few knowledgeable legal experts about whether this would apply in the case of retiree health care.  The responses are typically consistent – that while contract impairment provisions are sometimes successful with regard to the terms of a retirement system contract, nobody could point to a case where this provision was successfully applied to benefits under an employment contract because employment contracts, by their nature, are temporary.  If you doubt this, just consider the fact that the University of Illinois changed our contracts for the current year to allow the University to require involuntary, unpaid furloughs!

Of course, I am an economist, not a lawyer – and I am certainly no judge.  So this is not to say that retired Illinois public servants don’t have a case worthy of court if the state were to eliminate or substantially reduce their retiree health care benefits.  As has been pointed out to me by others, such a case is certainly likely to be given “an attentive listen” by the courts.  But whether that translates into any actual protection of benefits is anybody’s guess.  If I were a betting man (I’m not), then I would best against it.

So should retirees panic?  Of course not.  We should never forget that we live in a democracy, and most politicians know that the surest way to lose the next election is to do something that makes a large voting bloc – especially seniors – angry, motivated and mobilized.  Politically, I doubt the state will do anything so drastic as to eliminate retiree health benefits for existing retirees or those close to retirement.  But even if drastic changes are out, the reality of the dire long-run budget picture in Illinois would seem to dictate that retiree health care will be an area that legislators look to for future savings. 

So, I would much rather that retired public servants enjoy their retirement worry-free.  But for those who want something to worry about, then retiree health benefits are worth a lot more worry than pension benefits.

Last week I wrote about the (often misguided) debate over the generosity of public pensions in the state of Illinois.  I ended by noting that it was important to further examine how my previous analysis would change once we account for two under-appreciated facts about the Illinois pension system.    

The first under-appreciated fact is that Illinois is one of a small number of states that provides an explicit constitutional guarantee against the impairment of pension benefits.  Specifically, Article XIII section 5 of the Illinois State constitution states that: “Membership in any pension or retirement system of the State … shall be an enforceable contractual relationship, the benefits of which shall not be diminished or impaired.”

While Illinois is not alone in providing this guarantee – similar language is included in the constitutions of Alaska, Arizona, Hawaii, Louisiana, Michigan and New York – it should be noted that not all states provide such a guarantee.  In Indiana, for example, the Indiana Court of Appeals (in Haverstock v. State Public Employees Retirement Fund” stated that “pensions are mere gratuities springing from the appreciation and graciousness of the state.”

In a paper that I wrote with David Wilcox in the May 2009 American Economic Review, we discuss just how powerful these guarantees have proven to be over the years.  On the basis of that analysis, I am highly confident that Illinois pensioners will receive their benefits.  Unfortunately, with Illinois having one of the worst records of effective governance in the U.S., most other pensioners and participants are not quite so confident.  One way or another, most of them think, the politicians in this state will find some way to renege (at least partially) on these benefits.  (As an aside, what public servants really have reason to be afraid of is that retiree health benefits will disappear – those are not covered by the impairment clause.) 

The second underappreciated fact is that the public defined benefit pension plans in Illinois are far too complex for the average (or even the highly sophisticated) participant, taxpayer or legislator to properly value.  There are many reasons for this, but mainly it boils down to the fact that the ultimate benefit depends on a lot of variables that will only be known with certainty many years in the future, such as one’s final average salary.  If that were not complex enough, the legislature has made it even more complicated by having multiple benefit formulas in place.  For example, in the “Traditional” defined benefit plan under the State Universities Retirement System (SURS), participants who joined the system prior to July 2005 received a benefit that was the higher of two approaches.  The first was the standard formula (2.2% times years of service times final average compensation).  The second was a “money purchase” option that essentially kept track of the individual’s contributions, matched them with a state match (at least on paper – we already know the state did not really provide the money), and then credited them with an “Effective Rate of Interest,” or ERI.  Then, at retirement, the “balance” in this largely fictitious account was converted to an annuity using an annuity table that used a rate quite close to the ERI.  If the resulting number was higher than the standard formula, the annuitant gets this higher amount instead. 

Confused yet?  If you answered “yes,” don’t feel bad.  Most participants don’t understand all these details.  It is complex stuff that requires a high degree of financial sophistication to truly follow.  If you answer “no,” then let me ask a few extra credit questions.  First, do you know what mean, standard deviation and range the ERI has been in for the last 25 years?  And do you know how the annuity conversion factor compares to market rates?

By this point, I suspect very few people know the answer.  Again, don’t feel bad.  I study pensions for a living, and it took me a lot of time and research to find these answers (and, alas, it was too late – by the time I understood all the details, I had already made a sub-optimal pension choice – and it was unfortunately a lifetime irrevocable one!) 

Without boring you with details, let me give you a flavor of what I have since learned.  The way the SURS board has historically set the ERI, participants in the DB plan were getting an enormously high return (roughly 8-9%) relative to the risk (as measured by the standard deviation in the ERI, which was tiny over the past 25 years), and this high return was being implicitly guaranteed by the taxpayer.  And the annuity rate?  It is substantially more favorable than even the most attractive private market annuity prices – I’m talking in the range of 50% or more benefits per dollar in the “account,” and in some cases, far more.  These two factors explain why most people retiring from SURS in recent years actually received a higher benefit from the money purchase calculation than the basic formula.

What do these two points – the constitutional guarantee and the complexity of the benefit formula – have to do with each other?  Put simply, they have conspired to put an enormous pension funding burden on taxpayers without providing commensurate perceived value to state workers!

Let me explain.  As a result of a complex benefit formula that hides the true value of the pensions – combined with the fact that most participants view the DB pension promises as being at some risk of not being honored – means that most public pension participants do not value the pensions at their full economic value.  This fact partially mitigates the point I made last time because this means the “compensating wage differential” will not be dollar-for-dollar. 

However, the fact that participants discount their benefits in this way does NOT mean that the state is not actually incurring the full economic costs.  Indeed, the constitutional guarantee means that the states’ taxpayers ARE on the hook for the full economic cost of these benefits.

In essence, we have the worst of both worlds.  Public employees are earning a valuable benefit, but because our legislators have (i) created a needlessly complex system, (ii) created a complete lack of confidence in the security of these promises, and (iii) have provided us with a constitutional guarantee that the benefits will be paid, the participants don’t fully value the benefits even though the state bears the full costs.

If any private company did this – providing a costly benefit that was valued by employees at less than the true cost to the employer – that company would soon be bankrupt.  But this is Illinois state government.  So, instead, we continue to build up enormous funding liabilities that will simply be passed on to the next generation of Illinois taxpayers.  It may be “business as usual” in Illinois.  But it’s also a real shame.

Public servants and taxpayers of Illinois deserve better.

The Chicago Sun Times has recently had a series of articles about public pensions in Illinois.  One of the recent ones – “Public pensions, fat retirements” – focuses on the 4,000 retired government workers that receive pensions of at least $100,000 per year.  The article quotes several people saying things like “it’s both illogical and extraordinarily expensive” to provide such pensions and noting that public pensions are “extremely generous.”

There is no question that public pension funding in Illinois is in need of serious attention.  For those that have not yet noticed, Illinois pension obligations are enormous – and this is primarily the result of many decades of irresponsible budget practices on the part of Illinois politicians who have consistently chosen to underfund pensions.  In essence, the State has a history of not paying its pension bills, and future Illinois taxpayers will eventually have to ante up in a big way.  This is an enormous problem, and one that needs to be addressed.  I will focus more on the fiscal strains of pensions in future posts.

For this post, I simply want to comment on the debate about whether public pensions are really “too generous.”  What exactly does this mean?  (The short answer is that such statements are largely vacuous … read on).

Some people make such statements on the basis of comparing Illinois pensions to those of retirees in the private sector or in other states.  This leads to a whole host of arguments from critics and defenders, such as the fact that Illinois public workers do not participate in Social security.  

At the end of the day, however, none of these arguments are the least bit helpful in answering the question at hand.  The reason is that pensions are only one part of the total compensation package.  To the extent that labor markets in Illinois and the US more broadly are reasonably competitive, then workers are trading pension benefits against other forms of compensation, including wages. 

Most economists believe that workers bear the cost of employee benefits in the form of lower wages.  Let’s suppose a newly minted PhD has been offered positions as an assistant professor at the University of Illinois and at the University of Michigan.  The academic labor market is pretty darn competitive, so the University of Illinois will only be successful at hiring this person if the total compensation package is competitive.  The pension is one piece of that package, but there are numerous other factors at play as well.  If we were to offer an individual a less generous pension, then the University would almost surely have to compensate this person in other ways, such as higher pay, more generous health benefits, more time off, or something else.

So when pensioners say the earned their benefits, they are right.  Not only did they pay their own contributions into the system, but the state contributions (yes, the ones that never actually got made!) were also funded by these very same employees in the form of lower wages.  In essence, state employees accepted lower wages in return for a promised future pension benefit.  

If we believe we have the mix of compensation wrong, then let’s adjust this mix for future workers (we have to focus on the future because the impairment clause of the state constitution restricts our ability to do so for current workers).  But let us not be so naïve as to think that we can cut pension benefits while holding all else equal. 

So at the end of the day it really makes little economic sense to suggest that pensions are “too generous,” given that the pensioners paid for these benefits throughout their careers.  The problem is not pension generosity - the problem is the politicians who could not keep their hands off the money. 

In future posts, I will discuss in more detail how the above analysis changes when we consider two important factors.  First, that in spite of a constitutional guarantee of pension benefits, participants don’t have complete confidence in the inviolability of their benefits.  Second, that the complexity of the pension benefit calculations means that very few participants, taxpayers or policymakers truly understand the true economic value or costs of the benefits that are being provided.  Stay tuned …