This year, the retirement industry celebrates the 50th anniversary of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA), a law aimed at protecting American workers' retirement prospects by establishing minimum standards for private sector pension plans. The law has no doubt had significant impact on the retirement industry, however, there is more work to be done, according to Morningstar Center for Retirement & Policy Studies, which just published a new report.

"To quantify the impact of ERISA, we conducted an analysis of retirement outcomes assuming ERISA was never enacted," said Spencer Look, Morningstar's associate director of retirement studies. "To accomplish this, we excluded individual account plans (i.e., IRAs and DC accounts) in our projections, as ERISA created IRAs and contributed to the shift from DB to DC plans. The exclusion of individual account plans led to significantly lower savings levels, compared to our baseline results, which is why we found that a significant larger percentage of households would run short of money in retirement in this analysis."

Of course, the shift from defined-benefit to defined-contribution plans during the last 50 years has significantly impacted the landscape for employer-sponsored retirement plans in the United States, according to the Morningstar report, The Evolution of Retirement-Income Adequacy Under ERISA With a Focus on Defined-Contribution Plans.