Forum Network

A panel of senior economists responds to questions about money management and retirement posed by PBS Newshour economics correspondent Paul Solman and by audience members.

We live in a time of great changes to the way that Americans save, invest, and manage the risks posed to their standard of living. Economists have been studying consumers' optimal saving and investing decisions for many decades. Since the 1950s there has been enormous progress in the underlying theory, and since the 1970s major innovations in the financial markets and advances in technology have facilitated implementation of that theory. In the last two decades, research in behavioral economics and finance has considerably advanced our understanding of how consumers actually make saving and investment decisions. Life-cycle saving and investing have become a science, or at least the foundations have been laid for such a science.

This conference is the second in a series that brings together academic researchers, expert practitioners, and public-sector policymakers to explore what the modern science of life-cycle finance implies for households, businesses, and government. In the first conference, the focus was on the pre-retirement phase of the life cycle. This second conference focuses on the retirement phase and aims to encourage the adoption of best practices in the development of both new financial products and future public policies.