Retirement planning is often a joint household decision-making process, and therefore the household is often the more appropriate unit of analysis. However, retirement savings in tax advantaged accounts are held in the name of one individual. While spouses have rights to these assets in the case...

This paper uses ESPlannerTM -- a life-cycle, financial planning model -- to investigate the potential impact of alternative fiscal policies on current consumption and saving. Studies to date have examined the response of current consumption to tax-induced temporary and permanent income changes....

When it comes to estimating the benefits of long-term savings, many people rely on their intuition. Focusing on the domain of retirement savings, we use a randomized experiment to explore people's intuition about how money accumulates over time. We ask half of our sample to estimate future...

Large variations in retirement wealth are common, with some households accumulating hundreds of thousands of dollars and others accumulating next to nothing. We examine to what extent formal planning or simple rules of thumb contribute to these differences in wealth accumulation. In particular,...

A canonical but untested assumption in economics is that choices are determined only by preferences and budget constraints, but not by how people approach decision making. In particular, it is believed that people behave “as if they optimized”, even if they do not engage in any formal...