What you don't know can't help you

Description

"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. We find that well-informed individuals are five times more responsive to pension incentives than the average individual when knowledge is ignored. We further find that the ill-informed individuals do respond to their own misperception of the incentives, rather than being unresponsive to any incentives"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site.

Subjects

Series Statement

• NBER working paper series ;
• working paper 10185
• Working paper series (National Bureau of Economic Research : Online) ;
• working paper no. 10185.

Links

• http://papers.nber.org/papers/W10185
• URL