Knowledge is power in the face of overheated rhetoric about the level of funding for public pensions and whether their revenues and reserves are adequate to meet current and future needs. The Public Pension Funding Forum is where members of the community assemble to strengthen their understanding of the most important trends and developments in pension funding. 

The hallmark of this event is to deliver new thinking that might solve the challenges and preserve and enhance public pension plans and hence bolster future prosperity.

NCPERS gather the best minds in pension funding, including leading economists and Nobel laureates, to present and debate the latest research and data. This Forum injects substantive, objective analysis and a dollop of common sense into the debate over funding levels.

The Forum also showcases emerging funding solutions and delves into case studies that offer a practical perspective on which pension reform initiatives have and haven’t worked. Forum participants examine the short-term effects of tweaking public pension benefits and formulas, as well as the long-term, negative implications for communities and economic growth if advocates of dismantling public pensions get their way.

Participants should come away with a deepened understanding of the fiscal, political, social, and economic forces shaping the debate over public pension funding and impacting pension systems nationwide. They should also gain a practical understanding of the varied public pension landscape and a sharpened instinct for what constitutes pure rhetoric vs. informative fact in the pension funding debate.

For example, it is widely understood that failures by some state and local governments to stabilize the funding of public pensions when times were good have compounded the stresses some systems feel. However, experts will debunk perceptions that pension plans are universally underfunded and that the system, consequentially, is unsustainable and unaffordable. The data tells a different story.

Conference website