What You Don't Know Can't Help You: Pension Knowledge and Retirement Decision-Making

A-Tier
Journal: Review of Economics and Statistics
Year: 2008
Volume: 90
Issue: 2
Pages: 253-266

Authors (2)

Score contribution per author:

2.011 = (α=2.01 / 2 authors) × 2.0x A-tier

α: calibrated so average coauthorship-adjusted count equals average raw count

Abstract

This paper provides an answer to an important empirical puzzle in the retirement literature: while most people know little about their own pension plans, retirement behavior is strongly affected by pension incentives. We combine administrative and self-reported pension data to measure the retirement response to actual and perceived financial incentives and document an important role for self-reported pension data in determining retirement behavior. Well-informed individuals are far more responsive to pension incentives than the average individual. Ill-informed individuals seem to respond systematically to their own misperceptions of pension incentives. Copyright by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Technical Details

RePEc Handle
repec:tpr:restat:v:90:y:2008:i:2:p:253-266
Journal Field
General
Author Count
2
Added to Database
2026-01-29