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February 2017

Savings After Retirement: A Survey

By Mariacristina De Nardi, Eric French,& John B. Jones The saving patterns of retired U.S. households pose a challenge to the basic life-cycle model of saving. The observed patterns of out-of-pocket medical expenses, which rise quickly with age and income during retirement, and heterogeneous lifespan risk, can explain a significant portion U.S. savings during retirement. However, more work is needed to disentangle these precautionary saving motives from other motives, such as the desire to leave bequests. An important complementary question...

Retirement Security in an Aging Society

By James M. Poterba The share of the U.S. population over the age of 65 was 8.1 percent in 1950, 12.4 percent in 2000, and is projected to reach 20.9 percent by 2050. The percent over 85 is projected to more than double from current levels, reaching 4.2 percent by mid-century. The aging of the U.S. population makes issues of retirement security increasingly important. Elderly individuals exhibit wide disparities in their sources of income. For those in the bottom half of...

The Role of Time Preferences and Exponential-Growth Bias in Retirement Savings

By Gopi Shah Goda, Matthew R. Levy, Colleen Flaherty Manchester, Aaron Sojourner & Joshua Tasoff There is considerable variation in retirement savings within income, age, and educational categories. Using a broad sample of the U.S. population, we elicit time preference parameters from a quasi-hyperbolic discounting model, and perceptions of exponential growth. We find that present bias (PB), the tendency to value utility in the present over the future in a dynamically inconsistent way, and exponential-growth bias (EGB), the tendency to...

Do Financial Advisers Influence Savings Behavior?

By Jeremy Burke & Angela A. Hung There is substantial evidence that Americans tend to have low financial literacy (Lusardi and Mitchell, 2013) and are struggling with building sufficient wealth for a secure retirement (Helman et al., 2014). Financial advisers can play an important role by helping individuals make better financial decisions and improving their financial situations. However, there is limited and mixed evidence about the benefits to using a financial adviser. For example, as summarized in Burke et al....

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

By Sewin Chan & Ann Huff Stevens 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...

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

By Sewin Chan & Ann Huff Stevens 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...

Advancing the Ugandan Economy: A Personal Account

By Ezra Sabiti Suruma In 1973, when I returned from a seven-year tour of study in the United States to take up a teaching job at Makerere University (Kampala, Uganda), General Idi Amin was the president of Uganda and political parties were banned. There was no opportunity for anyone, including a young academic returning from study abroad, to participate in shaping the country’s political economy. The economy was starting to fail, and fear was spreading among the population because of...

The Issue of Rural Banking and Microfinance Institutions (Chapter)

By Ezra Sabiti Suruma The first quarter century of Uganda’s independence from British colonial rule (1962–85) was characterized by internal conflicts, dictatorship, and economic disintegration. However, the subsequent years (1986–2012) were marked by relative political and economic stability as well as sustained economic growth. During this period of transition, Ezra Suruma held many high positions in the arena of Ugandan politics and economics and served with distinction as Uganda’s minister of finance and economic development from 2005 to 2009.Advancing the...

Do Pension Plans with Participant Investment Choice Teach Households to Hold More Equity?

By Scott Weisbenner Some retirement plans allow the participant to choose how funds are invested. Having to direct investments may provide the participant with financial education. This paper finds that households covered by pension plans in which the employee chooses investments are significantly more apt to hold stock outside of their retirement plan than are households with pension plans offering no such choice. The effect of investment choice upon non-pension asset allocation cannot be explained by portfolio rebalancing or differences...