This paper examines who contributes and who persists in contributing in a national, voluntary, defined contributory pension program, where the government provides the incentive of matching contributions of a minimum amount (USD 16). The paper uses proprietary data from a financial services firm...

Retirees confront the difficult problem of how to manage their money in retirement so as to not outlive their funds while continuing to invest in capital markets. We posit a dynamic utility maximizer who makes both asset location and allocation decisions when managing her retirement financial...

Recent advances in behavioral genetics have enabled the discovery of genetic scores linked to a variety of economic outcomes, including education. We build on this progress to demonstrate that the same genetic variants that predict educational attainment independently predict household wealth in...

This paper examines two behavioral factors that diminish people's ability to value a life-time income stream or annuity, drawing on a survey of about 4,000 adults in a U.S. nationally representative sample. By experimentally varying the degree of complexity, we provide the first causal evidence...

We use panel data from the Swiss Labor Force Survey to estimate age-earnings profiles as well as transitory and permanent income shock variances for investor groups distinguished by gender, education and activity rate. Estimation results are then used to stylize several different Swiss investor...

Dokumentiert wird der Austausch über das Riester-Sparen, der auf dem Workshop des DIW Berlin stattfand. Teilnehmer dieser Veranstaltung waren Wissenschaftler sowie Vertreter aus Wirtschaft und Politik. Die Gespräche fanden entlang von Vorträgen statt. Kontrovers diskutiert wurde über die...

Dokumentiert wird der Austausch über das Riester-Sparen, der auf dem Workshop des DIW Berlin stattfand. Teilnehmer dieser Veranstaltung waren Wissenschaftler sowie Vertreter aus Wirtschaft und Politik. Die Gespräche fanden entlang von Vorträgen statt. Kontrovers diskutiert wurde über die...

Managing retirement wealth is one of the major financial decisions that individuals face. In this setting, I document a strong negative relationship between stock market returns and annuitization. Using a novel dataset with more than 103,000 actual payout decisions, I find that positive stock...

Economists have long been puzzled by the low demand for life annuities. To shed new light on this puzzle, we study payout choices in the Oregon Public Employees Retirement System, where each retiree must choose between a lump sum and a life annuity. Notably, the average life annuity we study is...

We analyze the long-standing “annuity puzzle” through the lens of behavioral economics. We provide novel evidence that lessens the extent of the puzzle and shed some additional light on the real drivers of the decision to annuitize. Last, we discuss the policy implications of our findings