“De‐risking” Corporate Pension Plans: Options for CFOs

Until the stock market bubble burst in 2000–2002, most CFOs viewed their defined benefit pension plans as profit centers and relatively risk‐free sources of income. Since neither pension assets nor liabilities were reported on corporate balance sheets, and expected returns on pension stocks could be substituted for actual returns when reporting net income, the risks associated with DB plans were masked by GAAP accounting and thus assumed to have no bearing on corporate capital structure. But when stock prices and corporate profits fell together, the risks associated with conventional stock‐heavy pension plans showed up first in reduced pension surpluses (or, in many cases, deficits) and then later in higher required cash contributions and lower reported earnings. As a consequence, today's investors (and rating agencies) are viewing pension and other legacy liabilities as corporate debt, and demands for transparency and increased funding have triggered accounting changes and proposed legislative reforms that will further unmask the economics. This article aims to provide both private‐sector and public‐sector CFOs with suggestions for reducing and controlling the cost of providing for the retirement of their employees. Profitable, tax‐paying companies with DB plans should consider (1) funding any unfunded liabilities (if necessary, by issuing debt) and (2) reducing pension equity and interest rate exposures by shifting some (if not all) pension assets into bonds and defeasing the pension liability (achieving a tax arbitrage in the process). And in cases where the expected costs of maintaining DB plans outweigh the benefits, companies should consider freezing or terminating their plans and switching to a defined contribution (DC) or some form of hybrid plan. The authors also propose similar changes for public pension plans, where underfunding and mismatch problems are greater, less transparent, and in some ways less tractable than those of corporate DB plans.     

THE VALUATION OF NONMARKET ACTIVITIES IN INCOME ACCOUNTING

Expanding a conventional national accounting framework in order to include activities that are not produced or consumed via ordinary markets requires the accountant to adopt some procedure for assigning unit values to these activities. Often, as is the case with governmental services, unit values are equated with unit costs of production.
This paper argues that the appropriate valuation generally differs depending on whether the activity is viewed from the perspective of the producer, the consumer, or society. The theoretical justification for this position is developed first for the case of nonmarketed environmental services and then for in-kind governmental transfers.
Rather than choosing a single unit value, the paper argues for and outlines an accounting system that will permit the simultaneous adoption of more than one valuation. Techniques for implementing the system for the environment and for in-kind transfers are discussed.
Finally, drawing on the experience of the authors, the paper argues for the importance of developing data sets with more than one valuation. The authors claim that the effort to implement the system has generated valuable ancillary data sets even though data limitations and unresolved methodological questions have precluded complete implementation.     

Defeasing Legacy Costs*

The authors propose a new way to defease the legacy costs of America's defined benefit pension system that will help ensure its viability. The proposal would allow companies to exchange their legacy pension debt for another liability with more attractive terms—to the benefit of the sponsor, the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC), and the plan participants. The transparency gained by separating the past from future liabilities will give better insight into sponsors' balance sheets. And it could take the PBGC out of the impossible position of insuring against events over which the insured have considerable control.     

THE VALUE OF SERVCES PROVDED BY THE STOCK OF GOVERNMENT-OWNED FIXED CAPTAL IN THE UNITED STATES, 1948–79

Expanded measures of government product normally include imputations for the services of government capital. This article discusses several approaches to measuring the value of the services of government capital and focuses on the conceptual and empirical difficultes associated with making such imputations. In addition, four sets of alternative estimates for 1948–79 are presented.     

Accounting for Environmental Services: Contrasting the SEEA and the ENRAP Approaches

Both the System of Integrated Environment and Economic Accounting (SEEA) and the Environmental and Natural Resources Accounting Project (ENRAP) are efforts to expand conventional national economic accounts in order to better reflect interactions between the market economy and the natural environment. In order to maintain a close relationship to the System of National Accounts (SNA) accounting standards, SEEA adopts conventional definitions of productive sectors. However, SEEA fails to account for many valuable services of the natural environment and encourages the use of techniques that provide misleading and poor estimates of depreciation and damage to the environment. ENRAP addresses these deficiencies by explicitly recognizing that the natural environment is a productive economic sector. ENRAP encourages the use of imputation approaches that draw on techniques common in the environmental economics literature. These approaches are consistent with definitions of depreciation and environmental damage widely accepted in economic theory. The principles that underlie the ENRAP approach provide a basis for contrasting ENRAP and SEEA empirically. Using Philippine data, SEEA-type estimates are compared with those of ENRAP.