Retirement Savings Plan

We provide new and robust empirical evidence that procrastinators behave differently than non_procrastinators for five important retirement_related financial behaviors. Empirically, we define a procrastinator as an individual who waits until the last day of their health care open enrollment period to make their plan election.

Automatic enrollment has been widely embraced for raising employee participation in 401(k) plans. However, the empirical evidence is based on data with limitations that, up until now, have prevented researchers from extrapolating the effects of automatic enrollment to the broader population of workers. This paper reexamines the determinants of 401(k) participation and contributions in the presence of automatic enrollment using nationally representative data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) for 2006 through 2012.