We report on our preliminary findings from an innovative module of survey questions in the RAND American Life Panel designed to measure willingness to delay take-up of Social Security benefits. Among respondents who expect to stop working full time prior to turning age 62, over 60 percent report...

We assess the welfare implications of alternative retirement plan investment options given that households may not invest according to optimal portfolio choice theory but may instead use simple decision rules. We simulate the performance of lifestyle, lifecycle, and other simple strategies for...

Theories on the formation of information cascades have been tested in experimental settings in which players publicly announce binary expectations of a binary event based on private signals and preceding public announcements. We replicate and supplement the experimental data collection by...

Over the past few decades, risks associated with providing for financial security in retirement have increasingly shifted from employers to employees as employer-provided pensions have shifted from defined-benefit to defined-contribution (DC) plans. Recent work in behavioral finance suggests...

The financial service industry is becoming increasingly complex and more difficult to regulate. This brief describes broker-dealers and investment advisers—their numbers, size, assets, clients, services, and affiliations—and examines whether individual investors understand the differences...

We assess the welfare implications of alternative retirement plan investment options given that households may not invest according to optimal portfolio choice theory but may instead use simple decision rules. We simulate the performance of lifestyle, lifecycle, and other simple strategies for...

This PDF document was made available as a public service of the RAND Corporation. In recent years, the evolution of the financial service industry has blurred traditional distinctions between broker-dealers and investment advisers and made it difficult to design appropriate regulatory schemes...

We report on our preliminary findings from an innovative module of survey questions in the RAND American Life Panel designed to measure willingness to delay take-up of Social Security benefits. Among respondents who expect to stop working full time prior to turning age 62, over 60 percent report...

The financial services industry has been changing so fast and growing so complex that broker-dealers and investment advisers, which are subject to different regulations, are no longer easy to distinguish from one another. Since the 1990s, market demands have introduced new business practices and...