Mark Warshawsky
Mark J. Warshawsky is Director of Retirement Research at Towers Watson, a global human capital consulting firm. He conducts and oversees research on employer-sponsored retirement programs and policies, social security, financial planning and health care financing. He has written numerous articles published in leading peer-reviewed scholarly journals, practitioner publications, conference volumes and working papers, has organized several research conferences, and has testified before Congress on public policies relating to pensions, annuities and other economic issues. He is a co-author of the Fundamentals of Private Pensions, Ninth Edition, 2009, published by Oxford University Press, and of Retirement Income: Risks and Strategies, forthcoming, MIT Press. A member of the Social Security Advisory Board for a term through 2012, he is also on the Advisory Board of the Pension Research Council of the Wharton School. From 2004 to 2006, Dr. Warshawsky served as assistant secretary for economic policy at the U.S. Treasury Department. There he played a key role in the development of the Administration's pension reform proposals, particularly pertaining to the funding of single-employer defined benefit plans, which formed the basis of the Pension Protection Act of 2006. Dr. Warshawsky's research led directly to the 2001-2 regulatory reform of minimum distribution requirements for qualified retirement plans. He is the inventor of the life care annuity, a product innovation integrating the immediate life annuity and long-term care insurance. For that research, Dr. Warshawsky won a prize from the British Institute of Actuaries in 2001. He has also held senior-level economic research positions at the Internal Revenue Service, the Federal Reserve Board in Washington, D.C. and TIAA-CREF, where he established the Paul A. Samuelson Prize. Dr. Warshawsky received a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University and a B.A. with Highest Distinction from Northwestern University.