Using transaction data from a sample of 1.8 million credit card accounts, we provide the first field test of a major prediction of Prelec and Loewenstein’s (1998) theory of mental accounting. The prediction is that consumers will pay off expenditure on transient forms of consumption more...

We study the allocation of attention to investment accounts among a large sample of individual investors. Investors login to view their accounts on average ten times more frequently than they trade, implying that login behavior is not primarily driven by trading activity. More diversified...

Attention utility is the hedonic pleasure or pain derived purely from paying attention to information. Using data on brokerage account logins by individual investors, we show that individuals devote disproportionate attention to already-known positive information about the performance of...

The object of this paper is to examine the impact of type of pension scheme on retirement behaviour. The well-documented decline in the labour-force participation of older women and older men (in particular) is common to most industrialised countries. The proportion of men aged 55 to 64 in...

This report surveys a dozen international comparative studies of poverty, income distribution and the elderly in OECD countries. It updates a previous Department of Social Security report — Whiteford and Kennedy, 1995, based on data from the mid- to late-1980s — including information up to...

This paper surveys a dozen international comparative studies of poverty, income distribution and older people in industrialized countries using data up to the mid-1990s. It addresses a series of questions. At what level are the incomes of the elderly relative to the population as a whole? How...

This paper surveys a dozen international comparative studies of poverty, income distribution and older people in industrialized countries using data up to the mid-1990s. It addresses a series of questions. At what level are the incomes of the elderly relative to the population as a whole? How...

While personal-pension mis-selling dominated the headlines, just as costly was the over-compensation offered to younger workers to contract out of the state scheme into personal pensions. The proposal for age-related rebates outlined in this book was later taken up by the government.

An attempt to unravel the complexities of pension policy in the UK, including financial, fiscal, labour-market and income-distribution analyses of the retirement-income system. This book, drawing on five years’ IFS research, was widely praised. A Financial Times editorial observed that ‘The...