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

Sewin Chan and Ann Stevens

No 10185, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

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. We find that well-informed individuals are five times more responsive to pension incentives than the average individual when knowledge is ignored. We further find that the ill-informed individuals do respond to their own misperception of the incentives, rather than being unresponsive to any incentives.

JEL-codes: J2 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2003-12
Note: LS AG
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

Published as Sewin Chan & Ann Huff Stevens, 2008. "What You Don't Know Can't Help You: Pension Knowledge and Retirement Decision-Making," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 90(2), pages 253-266, 04.

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Journal Article: What You Don't Know Can't Help You: Pension Knowledge and Retirement Decision-Making (2008)
Working Paper: What You Don?t Know Can?t Help You: Pension Knowledge and Retirement Decision Making (2005)
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