Teresa Ghilarducci

Teresa Ghilarducci is a labor economist and nationally recognized expert in retirement security.

Ghilarducci joined The New School in 2008 after 25 years as a professor of economics at the University of Notre Dame and 10 years as director of the school’s Higgins Labor Research Center. As an author, her most recent book – When I’m Sixty Four: The Plot Against Pensions and the Plan to Save Them – investigates the loss of pensions on older Americans and proposes a comprehensive system of reform. Her previous books include Labor’s Capital: The Economics and Politics of Employer Pensions, winner of an Association of American Publishers award in 1992, and Portable Pension Plans for Casual Labor Markets, published in 1995.

Ghilarducci’s work focuses on the need to restore the promise of retirement for every American worker. To do so, she has put forth a bold reform idea – the creation of Guaranteed Retirement Accounts (GRAs) – to solve the many problems Americans now face in planning for retirement: decreasing coverage and contributions, increasing investment risk, portability, leakage, high fees, and the drawdown of benefits in retirement.

Ghilarducci’s proposal has been met with critical success from high level opinion leaders. In February 2010, the White House Middle Class Task Force issued a report calling Ghilarducci’s proposal a viable option to help American families save for retirement, irrespective of their of financial sophistication, and called for further research on the plan. In July 2009, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) identified GRAs as one alternative to overhaul the U.S.retirement system. In 2008, New York Times Magazine named the GRA Plan one of the best ideas of the year.

Ghilarducci frequently publishes in peer-reviewed journals, testifies before the U.S. Congress, and is a media source to popular and online news outlets about pensions and labor economics. She writes a regular column for the Chronicle of Higher Education’s “Brainstorm” blog. In addition to her current work with the Rockefeller Foundation, her research has been funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, U.S. Department of Labor, Ford Foundation, and Retirement Research Foundation.