Economists have long suggested that higher private pension benefits "crowd out" other sources of household wealth accumulation. We exploit detailed information on pensions and lifetime earnings for older workers in the 1992 wave of the Health and Retirement Study and employ an...

Employer matching of employee 401(k) contributions can provide a powerful incentive to save for retirement and is a key component in pension-plan design in the United States. Using detailed administrative contribution, earnings, and pension-plan data from the Health and Retirement Study, this...

A key parameter in economics is the elasticity of intertemporal substitution (EIS), which measures the extent to which consumers shift total expenditures across time in response to changes in the effective rate of return. In contrast to the previous literature, which primarily has relied on...

Using Health and Retirement Study data on contributions, earnings, and pension plans, we examine the role of liquidity constraints in explaining why employees fail to take full advantage of employer matching contributions in 401(k) plans, leaving "money on the table."

Employer matching of employee 401(k) contributions can provide a powerful incentive to save for retirement. We examine the effect of matching on 401(k) saving accounting for non-linearities in the intertemporal budget set. We use detailed administrative contribution, earnings, and pension plan...

This paper examines the potential impact of government matching contributions on personal-account participation in the President's Commission on Strengthening Social Security's Model 3 for Social Security reform. Given the government's choice of four plan-design parameters, the magnitude of the...

Using Health and Retirement Study data and a structural econometric model, we exploit variation in employer matching rates in 401(k) plans to generate new estimates of the EIS: 0.74 in our richest specification, with a 95% confidence interval of 0.37-1.21.

Employer matching of employee 401(k) contributions can provide a powerful incentive to save for retirement and is a key component in pension-plan design in the United States. Using detailed administrative contribution, earnings, and pension-plan data from the Health and Retirement Study, this...