Tax-qualified retirement plans seek to promote saving for retirement, yet most employers permit pre- retirement access by letting 401(k) participants borrow plan assets. This paper examines who borrows and why, and who defaults on their loans. Our administrative dataset tracks several hundred...

Plan knowledge and trust in financial institutions – two variables missing from standard neoclassical or behavioral models of decision-making – are strongly correlated to 401(k) savings behavior based on results from this paper. In voluntary enrollment settings, plan knowledge and...

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...

At three large firms offering 401(k) plans, we assess the impact of financial literacy and trust on 401(k) savings behavior in voluntary and automatic enrollment 401(k) plans. Financial literacy plays a critical role in improving 401(k) savings behavior — it reduces both the proportion of...

We use data on five hundred 401(k) pension plans to evaluate how employer matching incentives influence retirement saving. Company matches prove to have a small effect on participation and saving rates; only one in ten non–highly compensated workers joins the plan because of employer match...

Important behavioral factors such as default and framing effects are increasingly being employed to optimize decision-making in a variety of settings, including individually-directed retirement plans. Yet such approaches may have unintended "spillover" effects, as we show with regard to the...

We develop a comprehensive model of 401(k) pension design that reflects the complex tax, savings, liquidity and investment incentives of such plans. Using a new dataset on some 500 plans covering nearly 740,000 workers, we show that employer matching contributions have only a modest impact on...

Several key lessons for pension design have emerged in the last decade from behavioral economics and finance research. This article analyzes the insights from this literature on how workers decide to save, manage their retirement investments, and draw down their assets in retirement. The aim is...

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...