Should there be guarantees in pension systems?

That’s the title of a Call for Papers sponsored by the Society of Actuaries.

Here’s the full description:

In the U.S. private employer-based defined benefit pension system, guarantees are implicitly built into the system in that corporations are expected to fund sufficiently to “guarantee” lifetime payment of employees’ benefit payments. In the event that a corporation is unable to meet its funding obligations, there is a government-backed guarantee program, with benefit limits up to a certain amount of income, through the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC) for eligible corporations. At the other end of the pension benefit spectrum, the U.S. private employer-based defined contribution plan system has no guarantees. For U.S. public employer-based defined benefit plans, there is no explicit guarantee beyond the employer’s funding capacity. Other countries’ employment-based pension systems may or may not have guarantees in place and the nature of the guarantees is wide-ranging. For this call for papers, the fundamental questions to be explored are: Should there be guarantees in employer-based pension systems? What are the social and/or economic benefits and costs for guarantees of such systems?

Unfortunately, I stumbled on this just today and abstracts are due tomorrow.

What do you think?  Should I write a paper?  And, if you were writing such a paper, what would you say?