This paper examines the role of economic factors in determining retirement behavior using a unique new data archive on more than 8,700 workers covered by ten different pension plans. We build on our earlier work by estimating several different retirement models including linear as well as...

This paper addresses two questions:(1) Are older persons' retirement ages significantly affected by the opportunities for income from earnings,private pensions, and Social Security and for leisure at alternative retirement ages?; and (2) How large are the estimated responses? Our approach to...

This paper examines how the structure of earnings and pension opportunities affects retirement behavior. We use a life cycle model of labor supply, paying special attention to the institutional features of private pensions and Social Security benefits. This theoretical formulation is used to...

Does retirement behavior react predictably to economic incentives? Evidence on this question would be useful to policy makers responsible for work and retirement programs affecting the elderly. This paper reviews the lessons and limitations of recent economics literature on pensions, earnings,...

Target date funds in corporate retirement plans grew from $5B in 2000 to $734B in 2018, partly because federal regulation sanctioned these as default investments in automatic enrollment plans. We show that adopters delegated pension investment decisions to fund managers selected by plan...

Using an incentivized survey and a representative sample of investors, we elicit ambiguity attitudes toward a familiar company stock, a local stock index, a foreign stock index, and a crypto currency. We separately estimate ambiguity aversion (ambiguity preferences) and perceived ambiguity...

We investigate how cognitive ability and financial literacy shape older Americans' demand for financial advice using an experimental module in the 2016 Health and Retirement Study. We show that cognitive ability and financial literacy strongly improve the quality, but not the quantity, of...

In the wake of the financial crisis and continued volatility in international capital markets, there is growing interest in mechanisms that can protect people against retirement account volatility. This paper explores the consequences for savers' wellbeing of implementing market-based retirement...

The US has long incentivized retirement saving in 401(k) and similar retirement accounts by permitting workers to defer taxes on contributions, levying them instead when retirees withdraw funds in retirement. This paper develops a dynamic life cycle model to show how and whether 'Rothification'...

We explore the relation between probability weighting and household portfolio underdiversification in a representative household survey, using custom-designed incentivized lotteries. On average, people display Inverse-S shaped probability weighting, overweighting the small probabilities of tail...