Researcher

This paper investigates the effectiveness of both videos and narratives in improving people's understanding of five basic concepts in financial planning: (1) compound interest; (2) inflation; (3) risk diversification; (4) tax treatment of retirement savings vehicles; and (5) employer matches of defined contribution savings plans. To that end the authors have administered a quiz about these concepts in the American Life Panel to establish a baseline of what respondents understand about these concepts.

This study surveyed thousands of Americans about their knowledge of retirement planning in general and Social Security in particular. It found that most Americans feel ill prepared for retirement and have a very low level of understanding of how the Social Security system works, when they should start claiming, and how much they are likely to receive in benefits. Respondents expressed a high level of trust in the Social Security Administration and would like more guidance from the agency on how to improve their retirement planning.

We study retirement savings decisions and outcomes in Oregon University System’s Optional Retirement Plan (ORP). During our sample period, 32% of ORP participants choose to invest through HIGH, which markets itself as providing personal face-to-face financial service. The other participants choose to invest through three lower-service providers, with 51% investing through LOW. Consistent with lower levels of financial literacy driving demand for financial advisors, we find that younger, less highly educated, and less highly paid employees are more likely to invest through HIGH.

Abstract: The boom in the subprime mortgage market yielded many loans with high LTV ratios. From a large proprietary database on subprime mortgages, we find that choice of mortgage rate type is not linear in loan sizes. A fixed rate mortgage contract is a popular choice when loan size, measured by LTV ratio, is small. As LTV ratio increases, borrowers become more likely to choose adjustable rate mortgage contracts. However, when LTV reaches a certain level, borrowers start to switch back to fixed rate contracts. For these high LTV loans, fixed rate mortgages dominate borrowers' choices.

This project examines how employer-provided financial education for newly hired workers affects participation in retirement savings plans. The investigators partnered with six large employers to explore what financial education is currently offered to new hires. Each employer provided individual data on workers hired in 2008 and 2009. This report assesses the impact of information and delivery methods on participation and contribution rates. Several findings emerge. There is strong evidence that employees respond to match incentives.

Abstract: We propose a novel approach to estimate household income uncertainty at various future horizons and characterize how the estimated uncertainty evolves over the life cycle. We measure income uncertainty as the variance of linear forecast errors conditional on information available to households prior to observing the realized income. This approach is semiparametric because we impose essentially no restrictions on the statistical properties of the forecast errors.

Prior research has demonstrated that defaults have a powerful influence on economic outcomes in a wide range of settings because individuals often passively accept default options. This paper examines the degree to which defaults become less powerful as they become more extreme. We study a firm with a defined contribution retirement savings plan in which employees are automatically enrolled at a 12% contribution rate, a rate that is considerably higher than those studied in previous work.

This annotated bibliography provides 52 abstracts of a representative sample of scholarly articles on the subject of the behavioral characteristics of U.S. investors, along with a glossary defining 72 terms commonly used in the literature on this topic.

Drawing on a comprehensive review of academic journal articles, the report reviews patterns of investor behavior that may be suboptimal and factors that may lead to such patterns. role of behavioral finance from the perspective of prospect theory, overconfidence and human sentiment, as well as explanations for a reluctance to invest including financial literacy and trust. It also discusses retirement saving inadequacy and reviews a series of common investment mistakes as well as behavioral patterns related to annuity and growth investing.

Merchant fees and reward programs generate an implicit monetary transfer to credit card users from non-card (or “cash”) users because merchants generally do not set differential prices for card users to recoup the costs of fees and rewards. On average, each cash-using household pays $149 to card-using households and each card-using household receives $1,133 from cash users every year. Because credit card spending and rewards are positively correlated with household income, the payment instrument transfer also induces a regressive transfer from low-income to high-income households in general.