Incorporating employee heterogeneity into default rules for retirement plan selection

"The NBER Bulletin on Aging and Health provides summaries of publications like this. You can sign up to receive the NBER Bulletin on Aging and Health by email. This paper examines the effect of incorporating individual-level heterogeneity into default rules for retirement plan selection. We use data from a large employer that transitioned from a defined benefit (DB) plan to a defined contribution (DC) plan, offering existing employees a one-time opportunity to make an irrevocable choice between plans. Employees who did not make a choice were defaulted to switch to the DC plan if under age 45 or remain in the DB plan if age 45 or older. Using a regression discontinuity framework, we estimate that the default increased the probability of enrolling in one plan over the other by 60 percentage points. We develop a framework to solve for the optimal age-based default rule analytically and use our results to empirically evaluate the optimal age-based default rule for the firm in our setting. Our simulations show that for a broad range of levels of risk aversion, allowing the default for the choice between pension plans to vary by age can substantially improve outcomes relative to a uniform default policy. Our results suggest that considerable welfare gains are possible in our model by varying defaults by observable characteristics"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site