Nobel Prize winner Richard Thaler may have added $29.6 billion to retirement accounts
Richard Thaler, the recent recipient of the Nobel Prize in economics, has helped retirement savers substantially in the past decade — to the tune of about $29.6 billion, perhaps, according to fellow researcher Shlomo Benartzi.
Though it is hard to calculate an exact estimate on how much has been saved in retirement specifically because of Thaler’s work, which focuses on behavioral economics and how to get people to stash away more money for their futures, clearly the implementation of Thaler’s theories of auto-enrollment and auto-escalation in workplace savings accounts into practice has helped.
More companies are signing up their employees to contribute to their retirement accounts automatically, and some are even increasing those contributions automatically as well (or at least giving them the option to do so). Between 15 million and 16 million people have boosted their savings rates — four times as many as in 2011, according to Benartzi and Thaler’s research.
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