This is an application to provide partial support for an April 2006 symposium, """"""""Transitioning to Retirement: How Will Boomers Fare?"""""""", sponsored by the Pension Research Council (PRC) and the Boettner Center for Pensions and Retirement Research at The Wharton School, UPenn. The 2006 conference has been designed to showcase early results on the economic, social, and health status of the Baby Boom cohort (b. 1948-1953) now reaching retirement age. This group was inducted into the on-going NIA-funded Health and Retirement Study (HRS) in 2004. Many of the speakers will use comparable data drawn from the original 1992 HRS cohort (b. 1936-1941) and the 1998 Early Boomer cohort (b. 1942-1947), to address the theme of the meeting by focusing on the relative retirement prospects of baby boomers, including issues of saving shortfalls, retirement wealth, health insurance coverage, and midlife health. This meeting therefore updates the volume published from papers presented at the 1998 meeting (Mitchell et al., 2000) that made first use of the earliest waves of the HRS. Papers for the 2006 meeting were selected from those submitted in response to an open, competitive call-for-papers announcement. The 11 accepted papers are authored by economists, demographers, and policy analysts, and they address a wide range of issues pertaining to the relative wellbeing of Baby Boomers. For the most part, these papers share a cross-cohort comparative design that varies period while holding age constant at 51-56. Several authors also adopt a dynamic cohort approach following successive cohorts over 3 or more points in time. The range of approaches therefore will provide distinct, but complementary, advantages for evaluating the relative financial position of early Baby Boomers, in a period of widespread uncertainties surrounding private pensions, Social Security benefits, and health insurance. Conference attendees will include academics, actuaries, sponsors of private pension and 401(k) plans, benefit specialists, and policy analysts. Based on past experience we expect some 140 participants to attend the 1.5 day meeting at the Wharton School. The Pension Research Council recently celebrated its 50th anniversary as a research center at the Wharton School of the UPenn. As Director since 1993, Dr. Olivia Mitchell has had a perfect track record of organizing similar annual conferences and ushering the invited papers through the peer review and editing process. Papers will be edited by the co-PIs for style and format and submitted to a University Press for refereeing and publication, generally within 18 months of the meeting. ? ? ?
