Can Information Change Personal Retirement Savings? Evidence from Social Security Benefits Statement Mailings

Susan Carter and William Skimmyhorn

AEA Papers and Proceedings, 2018, vol. 108, 93-97

Abstract: Despite concern about the viability of public retirement programs and potential undersaving for retirement, we still know little about the impact of government provided information on individual behavior. We exploit plausibly exogenous variation in exposure to the world's largest personalized retirement benefits statement from the US Social Security Administration to evaluate the effects of information and encouragement on individual retirement savings decisions. Using three natural experiments between 2011 and 2014 and administrative data, we find no impact of the statements on individual retirement savings in their employer provided retirement accounts.

JEL-codes: D14 D83 H55 J26 J32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
Note: DOI: 10.1257/pandp.20181041
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.aeaweb.org/doi/10.1257/pandp.20181041 (application/pdf)
https://www.aeaweb.org/articles/attachments?retrie ... KCcwODKVk2e3O6awPmpy (application/zip)
https://www.aeaweb.org/articles/attachments?retrie ... dRPaPfB_4nlfNQk6QNh1 (application/pdf)
https://www.aeaweb.org/articles/attachments?retrie ... xp62NmaXTVLWus5ymYt2 (application/zip)
Access to full text is restricted to AEA members and institutional subscribers.

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:aea:apandp:v:108:y:2018:p:93-97

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.aeaweb.org/subscribe.html

Access Statistics for this article

AEA Papers and Proceedings is currently edited by William Johnson and Kelly Markel

More articles in AEA Papers and Proceedings from American Economic Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Michael P. Albert ().