CAN PUBLIC PENSIONS SURVIVE THE NEXT RECESSION?.

• Author: Boehm, Eric
• Position: POLICY

A DECADE OF consistent economic growth lifted the major stock market indices to all-time highs in 2018. But even before the recent dip, many state pensionconsistent economic plans were struggling to get back to where they were before the last recession. Unfunded pension debt across the 50 states totals a staggering $1.6 trillion, even by the plans' own (often overly rosy) accounting.

If a decade of positive investment returns can't fix what's wrong with America's public pension systems, how much worse could things get in the event of another downturn? That's what Greg Mennis, Susan Banta, and David Draine, three researchers at the Harvard Kennedy School, set out to determine. They subjected state pension plans to a series of stress tests meant to simulate the consequences of a variety of adverse economic climates over the next two decades, including everything from another major recession to merely lower-than-expected investment growth.

What they found isn't pretty.

"Public pension systems may be more vulnerable to an economic downturn than they have ever been," the trio of researchers concluded in a paper published by the Pew Charitable Trusts in 2018. Deeply indebted pension plans in places such as Kentucky and New Jersey face insolvency if annual returns average 5 percent for the foreseeable future rather than the higher (usually around 7 percent) rates the plans assume. In other words, it won't take much to tip those systems into bankruptcy.

If a major downturn does come, states such as Colorado, Ohio, and Pennsylvania--which are closer to the...