I was interviewed for yesterday’s episode of Marketplace on federal debt and the Social Security Trust Fund. Hear it ~ 10:50 into this episode: marketplace.org/episode/2026…

Thrilled to announce that our new book *Retirement Saving, Investment, and Spending: New Lessons from Behavioral Research* is now available online! academic.oup.com/book/63080 Coedited by Nikolai Roussanov and myself, lots of smart people contributed.

Financial literacy shapes how we prepare for retirement — but it’s only part of the equation. New research coauthored by @Wharton's @OS_Mitchell examines how financial literacy and trust influence retirement saving and investment decisions. whr.tn/4i8FOLc

Allspring CEO Kate Burke has been named to the 2026 Influential Women in Institutional Investing list by @pensionsnews! Her path to CEO wasn't built in one corner of the business. Before leading Allspring, she held leadership roles across talent, operations, finance, and wealth management. Read her story at allsprg.co/4gTXh7P. #WeAreAllspring

“We’re in one of the biggest innovation cycles we’ve ever been in.” For Ann Miletti, the potential isn’t limited to technology. Watch her explain why small- and mid-cap industrial companies may sit at the intersection of artificial intelligence (AI) investment and global supply-chain realignment: allsprg.co/4id6CKa This material is for educational purposes only and is not intended to provide investment advice or a recommendation. Opinions expressed are those of the speaker. All investing involves risk.

“Retirement Saving, Investment, and Spending – New Lessons from Behavioral Research” has now published, and is available at Oxford University Press. Receive a 30% discount on orders placed through OUP. bit.ly/4hTSXYm

The Pension Research Council at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania is pleased to announce that The Pew Charitable Trusts has joined the Council as an Associate Member for 2026. bit.ly/4zCU1Gz

This should have been implemented *long* ago! "IRS Proposes Simpler Process for Retirement Rollovers" plansponsor.com/irs-proposes…

Europeans hold €33 trillion in savings but only 20 to 25% invest in equities. The reason, as I argue in a recent piece on Sweden's equity culture and what Europe can learn from it: people don't have the financial knowledge to navigate these types of decisions. Financial tools help, but knowledge has to come first. Read the full piece here: theparliamentmagazine.eu/new…

Very nice presentation by Olivia Mitchell at the @nberpubs Summer Institute this afternoon. I always learn a lot from her papers.

Recent research co-authored by Wharton's Olivia S. Mitchell unpacks the “annuity puzzle:” why retirees underutilize lifetime income solutions despite their benefits. bit.ly/4feaAiF

This is probably the best-case scenario for Social Security: policymakers behind closed doors agree to split the difference on tax increases and benefit cuts. But this also shows how far we've strayed from doing actual public policy--that is, programs that fulfil essential public needs, at costs that are lower than the benefits they provide--versus simply trying to prop up a framework that's approaching a century old. For instance, raising the Social Security retirement age to 69 seemingly makes sense, given longer lives. But this also means a 13% benefit cut to low-income seniors who aren't actually living longer--in effect, making them pay for a problem they didn't cause. Or raising the salary on which the 12.4% Social Security tax is levied, from the current $184,500 to to $250-$300k. What do we think those households are currently doing with that money? Saving for college. Saving for retirement. Does it make sense for them to pay that into Social Security, and then get even higher benefits later? And here's the kicker: the three reforms described would fix less than half of Social Security's funding gap! (As described, I'd guess around 40%.) I'm not blaming @JessicaBRiedl; everyone cites this "get them all in a room and split the difference" approach, and I've done it myself. And maybe this approach would have worked 25 years ago, when Social Security's deficit was less than half the current size. But now that Social Security's funding gap is so much bigger, policymakers need to think bigger as well. Or, not so much bigger as deeper. Meaning, don't just take the usual menu of options and multiply by 2, but think hard about why we have Social Security, what we want it to do, what functions we thought government had to do in 1935 that it doesn't need to do in 2035, and so on. Those questions, rather than a focus singularly on solvency, are actually the key to Social Security solvency.

Trump Accounts are here, and eligible children are starting to get a $1,000 seed deposit. But an account on its own doesn't build wealth. What a family understands about it does. Financial literacy is what turns access into lasting security.

Earned, but not (fully) paid for: according to the CBO, the average American retiring in the 2030s is promised 33% more in benefits than they paid in lifetime taxes + interest.

The Pension Research Council is pleased to congratulate Executive Director Olivia S Mitchell on receiving the 2026 ARIA Robert I. Mehr Award for her paper, "Framing and Claiming: How Information Framing Affects Expected Social Security Claiming Behavior," -

Salutes to @AnnaRappaport ! benefitspro.com/2026/06/17/r…

The Big Three has become one of the widely used measures of financial literacy in the world. In a new @nberpubs working paper, my co-authors and I put it to the test across multiple countries. It works, and we explain why. Read it here: nber.org/papers/w35342

What if annuities were marketed less as investments, and more as insurance against outliving your savings? New research from a team including Wharton's Olivia S. Mitchell argues that consumption-focused framing- bit.ly/4esulCw

@MoneyWeek on the Richmond Project's financial literacy report: only 28% of UK adults can correctly answer the Big Three questions that @OS_Mitchell and I developed over two decades ago. moneyweek.com/personal-finan…