I review the academic literature on defined contribution retirement plan design and participant behavior. While adoption of automatic enrollment has significantly increased participation rates, recent studies find the long-run effects on savings are smaller than the short-run effects, with some...

Oregon's Public Employees Retirement System (PERS) is a rich setting in which to study the effect of pension design on employer costs and employee retirement-timing decisions. PERS pays retirees the maximum benefit calculated using three formulas that can be characterized as defined benefit...

We use administrative data from Oregon's Public Employees Retirement System (PERS) to study the effect of pension design on employer costs and employee retirement-timing decisions. During our 1990–2003 sample period, PERS calculates each member's retirement benefit using up to three different...

type="main" <title type="main">ABSTRACT</title> <p>To rationalize the well-known underperformance of the average actively managed mutual fund, we exploit the fact that retail funds in different market segments compete for different types of investors. Within the segment of funds marketed directly to retail investors, we show...</p>

The independence of editorial content from advertisers' influence is a cornerstone of journalistic ethics. We test whether this independence is observed in practice. We find that mutual fund recommendations are correlated with past advertising in three personal finance publications but not in...

We study the impact of investor heterogeneity on mutual fund market segmentation. To motivate our empirical analysis, we make two assumptions. First, some investors inherently value broker services. Second, because brokers are only compensated when they sell mutual funds, they have little...

Although mutual funds exhibit little ability to persistently outperform their peers, money flows into funds with the highest past returns. Berk and Green (2004) rationalize these patterns by arguing that more-skilled managers manage more assets but, because of diseconomies of scale, generate the...

Household demand for actuarially unfair insurance against small risks has long puzzled economists. One way to potentially rationalize this demand is to recognize that (non-life) insurance is an incentive-compatible means of engaging an expert buyer. To quantify the benefits of expert buying, we...

The recent growth in the market for target-date funds (TDFs) allows us to study how mutual fund families structure new investment products. Given the widespread, legislation-induced use of TDFs as default investments in defined contribution retirement plans, this market holds special policy...

Within the Oregon University System's defined contribution retirement plan, one investment provider offers access to face-to-face financial advice through its network of brokers. We find that younger, less highly educated, and less highly paid employees are more likely to choose this provider....