Most workers in defined contribution retirement plans are inattentive portfolio managers: only a few engage in any trading at all, and only a tiny minority trades actively. Using a rich new dataset on 1.2 million workers in over 1,500 plans, we find that most 401(k) plan participants are...

There is reason to believe that technological approaches can help promote voluntary saving in 401(k) retirement accounts. Working with Vanguard, a leading 401(k) plan administrator, we are evaluating the impact of introducing innovations to websites made available to retirement plan...

This paper explores how earnings variability is related to retirement wealth. Past research has demonstrated that the average American household on the verge of retirement would need to save substantially more, in order to preserve consumption flows in old age. While several socioeconomic...

Demographic aging renders workers vulnerable to the inherent uncertainty of unfunded social security systems. This realization has set off a global wave of social security reforms, and more than 20 countries have set up Individual Accounts (IA) plans in response. Strengths of IAs are that...

Only a minority of American households feels “confident” about retirement saving adequacy, and little is known about why people fail to plan for retirement, and whether planning and information costs might affect retirement saving patterns. To better understand these issues, we devised and...

To assess the distributional effects of social security reform proposals, it is essential to have good information on real-world workers’ lifetime earnings trajectories. Until recently, however, policymakers have relied on hypothetical earnings profiles for policy analysis. We use actual...

Social Security reform proposals are often presented in terms of their differential impacts on hypothetical or ‘example’ workers. Our work explores how different benchmarks produce different replacement rate outcomes. We use the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) to evaluate how Social...

Recent research on wealth and household finances seeks to blend neoclassical models with an understanding of real-world imperfections to answer questions about why some people save and others do not. This paper focuses on Baby Boomers standing on the verge of retirement, many of whom have saved...

This project evaluates how workers might invest their Personal Retirement Account (PRA) funds between safe and risky assets, depending on whether they are offered a rate of return guarantee on the risky asset. We focus on how asset allocation decisions might differ depending on participants’...

How might retirees consider deploying the retirement assets accumulated in a defined contribution pension plan? One possibility would be to purchase an immediate annuity. Another approach, called the “phased withdrawal” strategy in the literature, would have the retiree invest his funds and...