New York-based First Eagle Investment Management has announced it will partner with Boston College’s Center for Retirement Research to provide financial support for research and implement tools for advisors, plan sponsors and retirement savers.
“We think that there is a big retirement crisis out there, and we hope that our support for this research is part of a solution,” said Mike Rosenberg, First Eagle’s head of retirement solutions. “Providing support to one of the pre-eminent academic research institutions in the retirement space is something that we felt was worth it.”
The Center for Retirement Research (CRR) connects the retirement industry and policy makers with academic research focused on retirement
First Eagle will collaborate with CRR to create a series of research papers exploring retirement topics like how workers save in retirement plans, what impacts retirement spending, and the impact of health care expenses and other financial shocks on different segments of the retiree population.
“We’re not instructing them to research any specific topic or seek any outcome, but we think it would be interesting to find out how people save and how they react to these shocks,” said Rosenberg. “We think the ‘autos’ -- auto-enrollment, auto-escalation and automatic defaults -- are great, but ‘set it and forget it’ is probably not the best activity for an educated workforce and educated plan participants moving forward.”
First Eagle hopes that the research can be used to develop an interactive platform for plan sponsors, advisors and participants to use in goals-based financial planning, said Rosenberg, in hopes of spurring more engagement between participants and their retirement plans.
While First Eagle has not established an exact dollar amount for its support, Rosenberg envisions an ongoing relationship between First Eagle and the researchers.