Discounting State and Local Pension Liabilities
指出美国州和地方政府养老金计划用资产预期收益率折现负债，导致负债低估、鼓励高风险投资和财政博弈，对政策制定者和投资者有参考价值。
Defined benefit (DB) pension plans continue to dominate the retirement landscape for the roughly 20 million state and local government workers in the United States. In most state and local plans, pension benefits are protected by constitutional, statutory, or common law guar antees. In many cases, these guarantees make the benefit promises to participants virtually free of risk. Finance theory is unambiguous that the discount rate used to value future pension obligations should reflect the riskiness of the liabilities. In actual practice, state and local plans gen erally set their discount rates based on the characteristics of the assets held in the pension trust rather than the characteristics of the pen sion liabilities. Specifically, these plans gener ally discount their pension liabilities using the assumed rate of return that the assets in the pen sion trust are expected to earn.1 This practice has several implications. First, the use of higher than-appropriate discount rates reduces the value of the pension obligations that is reported to the public, and thus likely reduces the con tributions that sponsors feel they must make to pre-fund their pension obligations. Second, the link between the discount rate and the expected return on plan assets may encourage sponsors to invest in riskier portfolios than they would oth erwise choose in order to justify a higher dis count rate, and thus a lower contribution into the pension trust. Third, these rules may encourage fiscal gaming in the form of Pension Obligation Bonds. These devices allow governments to borrow, invest in risky assets through the