The burgeoning legion of do-it-yourself retirement investors has had a lot to worry about in recent weeks: inflation, recession, energy prices, the credit crisis, a bank seizure. If this conspiracy of dire headlines has shoved you to the inevitable conclusion you will work until your dying breath, there's now empirical evidence for why you feel that way.

An Ernst & Young study released last week concludes that 59 percent of middle-income Pennsylvania households whose breadwinners are nearing retirement run a high risk of outliving their retirement savings. The number jumps to 74 percent for "near retirees," those seven years from retirement.

Put another way, the average recently retired middle class Pennsylvanian will have to reduce his or her standard of living by an average of 23 percent to avoid outliving their savings.

You call that living?

"Many Americans envision a leisurely retirement where their lifestyle continues much as before," says Ernst & Young's Tom Neubig. "Our work shows that this is not a realistic expectation and that ... retirees will have to cut back far more on expenditures than they had ever expected."

The accounting firm conducted the study on behalf of Americans for Secure Retirement, a public interest group promoting annuities as a way for retirees to draw a steady paycheck for all of their golden years -- the kind of security pension plans used to provide for most workers. The group is supporting legislation that would provide tax incentives for purchasing lifetime annuities. Sponsors of the proposal include U.S. Rep. Phil English, R-Erie.

Ernst & Young looked at 36 types of households at three income levels: $50,000, $75,000 and $100,000.

The study also found that: more than 80 percent of new retirees and 90 percent of near retirees not covered by an employer pension plan are likely to outlive their assets; married couples are more likely to outlive their assets than singles; and single females are more likely to outlive their assets than single males.

Guess it's back to the salt mines for all us baby boomers.

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Enron, WorldCom and other financial scandals of recent years have spawned a growing interest in the topic of corporate governance: how closely the policies of public companies and the actions of those who govern them are aligned with shareholder interests.

A cottage industry has developed around the issue, with consulting firms providing proprietary scorecards judging companies on how well they are governed. The theory goes something like this: The better governed a company is, the less likely it will be damaged by earnings restatements and shareholder lawsuits and the more likely it is that its shareholders will earn superior returns.

Pension funds, mutual funds and other large investors have bought into this belief. So have the financial press and boards of directors, some of whom believe that raising their company's corporate governance score is in the best interest of shareholders.

But a new study by business and law school professors at Stanford University questions the value and the validity of the ratings compiled by the industry's four largest practitioners.

"We find that these governance ratings have either limited or no success in predicting firm performance or other outcomes of interest to shareholders," the professors conclude.

Faculty members at Stanford's Rock Center for Corporate Governance studied more than 15,000 ratings of 6,800 firms from late 2005 to early 2007. The ratings were issued by RiskMetrics (which purchased Institutional Shareholder Services a few years ago), Governance Metrics International, The Corporate Library and Audit Integrity. Clients of the firms manage more than $40 trillion in assets and look to the firms for guidance on how to vote on takeover fights and other proxy issues.

While marketing literature sometimes claims that corporate governance scores can help investors avoid future problems, the Stanford professors did not find that to be the case. Only three of the firms had "very modest" ability to predict accounting restatements, while only two had "very modest" success at predicting class action lawsuits, they said.

"The level of predictive validity even for the best ratings is well below the threshold necessary to support the bold claims by the corporate governance rating firms," the authors conclude.

Although the four firms look at many of the same variables (executive compensation policies, anti-takeover provisions, and bylaws, for example), the professors found little agreement among the firms when they judged the same company.

It would be unfortunate if the findings provide ammunition to executives, directors and investors who assign a low priority to corporate governance. Hopefully, the study won't lessen the importance of good governance, just help public companies make better decisions when it comes to spending shareholder money on improving it.