State Auto-IRA Policies and Firm Behavior: Lessons from Administrative Tax Data

Adam Bloomfield, Lucas Goodman, Manita Rao and Sita Slavov

No 32817, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Several states have recently attempted to boost retirement saving by adopting “auto-IRA” policies that require employers not currently offering an employer-sponsored retirement plan (ESRP) to either (1) establish an ESRP or (2) enroll employees in state-facilitated Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs). We identify the effect of these state policies on firm decisions to offer ESRPs, exploiting the phased rollout of these policy treatments across states and employer size categories. Using U.S. tax microdata, we estimate that about 17% of treated firms have been induced to offer an ESRP by these policies, although there is substantial heterogeneity in these effects across firm and worker characteristics. This effect is large considering that, for employers, establishing and maintaining an ESRP is more costly than utilizing the state-facilitated IRAs. We explore both rational and behavioral explanations for why firms might choose the higher-cost option to comply with state auto-IRA policies.

JEL-codes: D14 H75 J26 J32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age and nep-lma
Note: AG LS PE
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w32817.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:32817

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w32817
The price is Paper copy available by mail.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().