Olivia Mitchell
As part of the 2024 Industry Innovation Awards, CIO will celebrate Olivia Mitchell, professor of business economics and public policy, as well as insurance and risk management, at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, with a Lifetime Achievement Award in recognition of her contributions to the industry.
Mitchell, whose titles also include International Foundation of Employee Benefit Plans professor, has spent more than 31 years at Penn and also serves as executive director of the Pension Research Council and as director of the Boettner Center on Pensions and Retirement Research there. In 2023, she was elected a distinguished fellow of the American Economic Association.
The award will be presented on December 10 at CIO’s Industry Innovation Awards Dinner in New York City.
The child of economists who attended high school in Lima, Peru, and Santiago, Chile, her college studies focused on development economics. However, in an early job, teaching at Cornell University, she was asked to teach a course on pensions and health insurers. Some time later, she was hired at Wharton to continue her focus on pensions and retirement security. She has stayed on that path.
She has also developed a focus on financial literacy, the subject of many of her recent articles, and she launched an undergraduate course at Penn called “Consumer Financial Decision Making” to help students learn to navigate the financial issues of adulthood.
Her research and experience make her a resource for policymakers seeking insights, ideas or recommendations.
Her contribution to the national dialogue about retirement included her role as a member of President George W. Bush’s Commission to Strengthen Social Security more than 20 years ago. That bipartisan group advocated ways to reduce the growth rate of benefits, without cutting benefits. It also recommended allowing Social Security participants to set aside some part of the Social Security tax contribution into a personal account, an idea that seemingly would have some support today, and one she says would have been “a wash” for the system’s solvency.
In her own words, “due to political opposition and also the fact that that year had 9/11, the plan was dead in the water.”
More than 20 years later, Social Security is estimated to have to start reducing benefits payments in 2034, and Mitchell predicts a political compromise on reforming the system will not come until the country is “within a couple of months of cutting benefits.”
Regarding pensions and longevity globally, Mitchell says the “workplace, workforce and employers are different today,” and new models are developing globally.
However, she acknowledges that in an aging world, people likely are going to have to “work longer, save more and expect less.”
CIO has presented the Lifetime Achievement Award since 2011 to individuals, including asset allocators, asset managers and now an academic, whose work in the pension and institutional investing business has protected and benefitted the investment resources of pension funds, endowments and foundations around the world.
Past honorees received the recognition for different efforts and varied careers, but the one thing they share are the contributions each has made to the community of investors and to institutional asset ownership. As we will tonight, this award has always recognized people who helped train the up-and-coming talent in the industry, who have given time and attention to solving complex problems independently, providing service to the industry, and advancing important ideas.
Previous winners have included (among others) Christopher Ailman, then CIO of the California State Teachers’ Retirement System; Walter Kress, CIO of EY; Robin Diamonte, then CIO of UTC, Thomas “Britt” Harris, then the CIO of the Teacher Retirement System of Texas; Mark Schmid, then the CIO of the University of Chicago; Ash Williams, the then-CIO and executive director of the Florida State Board of Administration; and Mansco Perry, the then CIO of the Minnesota State Board of Investment.
We have honored people for their innovations—in investing and in operations—their determination and their contributions to the community of the world’s investors and those concerned about retirement policy.
When reviewing the names that came up in our conversations this year, Mitchell was the choice.
After more than 45 years of research and teaching about pensions, investor behavior and financial literacy, and amid her ongoing work as an educator and policy adviser, she makes time to highlight the work of others in the field and to work with global groups to promote healthy aging and continue studying the work of pension and benefits world.
Related Stories:
Chris Ailman Wins CIO’s 2023 Lifetime Achievement Award
Walter Kress Receives CIO’s 2022 Lifetime Achievement Award
Robin Diamonte to Receive CIO’s 2019 Lifetime Achievement Award
Tags: Industry Innovation Awards, Lifetime Achievement Award, Olivia Mitchell, Wharton Pension Research Council, Wharton School