What You Don't Know Can't Help You: Pension Knowledge and Retirement Decision-Making

Sewin Chan and Ann Stevens
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Sewin Chan: Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, New York University

The Review of Economics and Statistics, 2008, vol. 90, issue 2, 253-266

Abstract: This paper provides an answer to an important empirical puzzle in the retirement literature: while most people know little about their own pension plans, retirement behavior is strongly affected by pension incentives. We combine administrative and self-reported pension data to measure the retirement response to actual and perceived financial incentives and document an important role for self-reported pension data in determining retirement behavior. Well-informed individuals are far more responsive to pension incentives than the average individual. Ill-informed individuals seem to respond systematically to their own misperceptions of pension incentives. Copyright by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Date: 2008
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Related works:
Working Paper: What You Don?t Know Can?t Help You: Pension Knowledge and Retirement Decision Making (2005)
Working Paper: What You Don't Know Can't Help You: Pension Knowledge and Retirement Decision Making (2003)
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