Employees are once again ramping up their commitment to their 401(k) plans.

Just 2.4 percent of Defined Contribution plan participants stopped contributing in 2010, compared with 3.4 percent of participants in 2009, according to the ICI's latest quarterly study.

Common wisdom holds  that small company owners drag their feet when it comes to retirement planning for themselves. Now a study from the Kauffman Foundation calls that assumption into question.

The study looked at Federal Reserve Board Survey of Consumer Finances data from 1989 to 2007. The research contains a wealth of information on household wealth, as well as attitudes toward saving and borrowing.  Researcher Tami Gurley-Calvez compared responses from business owners actively running their companies to wage and salary workers and found--among other things--that business owners think it's more important to save for retirement than everyone else, and they save for longer time horizons.

On Tuesday, I wrote that the new health reform law, for various reasons, will further erode employer-sponsored retiree health benefits. For employers bent on maintaining the primacy of the employer-based health care system this is a disappointing development. But it need not be all bad.

Here’s one way to look at it. The erosion of retiree health will lead more patients into Medicare, further burdening the federal program and making more urgent the need to change the way health care is paid for in the United States.

Every day or so we get another nugget of data that suggests the economy is slowly, but erratically, recovering.

Today's kernel: 80 percent of companies that suspended or reduced their company match in their 401(k) plan in 2009 are planning to restore it in 2010, according to a new study from Hewitt Associates.