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Over the life-cycle, wealth holdings tend to be highest in the early part of retirement. The quality of financial decisions among older adults is therefore an important determinant of their financial security during the asset drawdown phase. This paper assesses how financial literacy shapes financial decision-making at older ages. We devised a special module in the Singapore Life Panel survey to measure financial literacy to study its relationship with three aspects of household financial and investment behaviors: credit card debt repayment, stock market participation, and adherence to age-based investment glide paths. We found that the majority of respondents age 50+ has some grasp of concepts such as interest compounding and inflation, but fewer know about risk diversification. We provide evidence of a statistically significant positive association between financial literacy and each of the three aspects of suboptimal financial decision-making, controlling for many other factors, including education. A one-unit increase in the financial literacy score was associated with an 8.3 percentage point greater propensity to hold stocks, and a 1.7 percentage point higher likelihood of following an age-appropriate investment glide path. The financial literacy score is only weakly positively linked with timely credit card balance repayment, both in terms of statistical significance and estimate size.
We examined financial literacy among the young using the most recent wave of the 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. We showed that financial literacy is low; fewer than one-third of young adults possess basic knowledge of interest rates, inflation, and risk diversification. Financial literacy was strongly related to sociodemographic characteristics and family financial sophistication. Specifically, a college-educated male whose parents had stocks and retirement savings was about 45 percentage points more likely to know about risk diversification than a female with less than a high school education whose parents were not wealthy. These findings have implications for consumer policy. JEL Classification: D91
How ordinary consumers make complex economic decisions: financial literacy and retirement readiness
(2010)
This paper explores who is financially literate, whether people accurately perceive their own economic decision-making skills, and where these skills come from. Self-assessed and objective measures of financial literacy can be linked to consumers’ efforts to plan for retirement in the American Life Panel, and causal relationships with retirement planning examined by exploiting information about respondent financial knowledge acquired in school. Results show that those with more advanced financial knowledge are those more likely to be retirement-ready.
Substantial research attention has been devoted to the pension accumulation process, whereby employees and those advising them work to accumulate funds for retirement. Until recently, less analysis has been devoted to the pension decumulation process – the process by which retirees finance their consumption during retirement. This gap has recently begun to be filled by an active group of researchers examining key aspects of the pension payout market. One of the areas of most interesting investigation has been in the area of annuities, which are financial products intended to cover the risk of retirees outliving their assets. This paper reviews and extends recent research examining the role of annuities in helping finance retirement consumption. We also examine key market and regulatory factors.
The present paper introduces a new dataset, the Rand American Life Panel (ALP), which offers several appealing features for an analysis of financial literacy and retirement planning. It allows us to evaluate financial knowledge during workers’ prime earning years when they are making key financial decisions, and it offers detailed financial literacy and retirement planning questions, permitting a finer assessment of respondents’ financial literacy than heretofore feasible. We can also compare respondents’ self-assessed financial knowledge levels with objective measures of financial literacy, and most valuably, we can investigate prior financial training which permits us to identify key causal links. By every measure, and in every sample we examine, financial literacy proves to be a key determinant of retirement planning. We also find that respondent literacy is higher when they were exposed to economics in school and to company-based financial education programs. JEL Classification: D91
This paper examines data on financial sophistication among the U.S. older population, using a special-purpose module implemented in the Health and Retirement Study. We show that financial sophistication is deficient for older respondents (aged 55+). Specifically, many in this group lack a basic grasp of asset pricing, risk diversification, portfolio choice, and investment fees. Subpopulations with particular deficits include women, the least educated, persons over the age of 75, and non-Whites. In view of the fact that people are increasingly being asked to take on responsibility for their own retirement security, such lack of knowledge can have serious implications.
We analyze older individuals’ debt and financial vulnerability using data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) and the National Financial Capability Study (NFCS). Specifically, in the HRS we examine three different cohorts (individuals age 56–61) in 1992, 2004, and 2010 to evaluate cross-cohort changes in debt over time. We also use two waves of the NFCS (2012 and 2015) to gain additional insights into debt management and older individuals’ capacity to shield themselves against shocks. We show that recent cohorts have taken on more debt and face more financial insecurity, mostly due to having purchased more expensive homes with smaller down payments.
We analyze debt and debt management of Americans nearing retirement age. We show that older people have numerous financial obligations that can lead to financial distress. Using data from the 2015 National Financial Capability Study and an extensive literature review, we show that lack of financial literacy, lack of information, and behavioral biases help explain the prevalence of debt later in life. Our evidence indicates that debt at older ages can negatively influence retirement well-being.
This chapter outlines the conditions under which accounting-based smoothing can be beneficial for policyholders who hold with-profit or participating payout life annuities (PLAs). We use a realistically-calibrated model of PLAs to explore how alternative accounting techniques influence policyholder welfare as well as insurer profitability and stability. We find that accounting smoothing of participating life annuities is favorable to consumers and insurers, as it mitigates the impact of short-term volatility and enhances the utility of these long-term annuity contracts.
The direct financial impact of the financial crisis has been to deal a heavy blow to investment-based pensions; many workers lost a substantial portion of their retirement saving. The financial sector implosion produced an economic crisis for the rest of the economy via high unemployment and reduced labor earnings, which reduced household contributions to Social Security and some private pensions. Our research asks which types of individuals were most affected by these dual financial and economic shocks, and it also explores how people may react by changing their consumption, saving and investment, work and retirement, and annuitization decisions. We do so with a realistically calibrated lifecycle framework allowing for time-varying investment opportunities and countercyclical risky labor income dynamics. We show that households near retirement will reduce both short- and long-term consumption, boost work effort, and defer retirement. Younger cohorts will initially reduce their work hours, consumption, saving, and equity exposure; later in life, they will work more, retire later, consume less, invest more in stocks, save more, and reduce their demand for private annuities. Keywords: Financial Crisis , Household Finance , Cycle Portfolio Choice , Labor Supply Classification: D1, G11, G23, G35, J14, J26, J32
Many Americans claim Social Security benefits early, though this leaves them with lower benefits throughout retirement. We build a lifecycle model that closely tracks claiming patterns under current rules, and we use it to predict claiming delays if, by delaying benefits, people received a lump sum instead of an annuity. We predict that current early claimers would defer claiming by a year given actuarially fair lump sums, and the predictions conform with respondents’ answers to a strategic survey about the lump sum. In other words, such a reform could provide an avenue for encouraging delayed retirement without benefit cuts or tax increases. Moreover, many people would still defer claiming even for smaller lump sums.
Target date funds in corporate retirement plans grew from $5B in 2000 to $734B in 2018, partly because federal regulation sanctioned these as default investments in automatic enrollment plans. We show that adopters delegated pension investment decisions to fund managers selected by plan sponsors. Including these funds in retirement saving menus raised equity shares, boosted bond exposures, curtailed cash/company stock holdings, and reduced idiosyncratic risk. The adoption of low-cost target date funds may enhance retirement wealth by as much as 50 percent over a 30-year horizon.
We have designed and implemented an experimental module in the 2014 Health and Retirement Study to measure older persons' willingness to defer claiming of Social Security benefits. Under the current system’ status quo where delaying claiming boosts eventual benefits, we show that 46% of the respondents would delay claiming and work longer. If respondents were instead offered an actuarially fair lump sum payment instead of higher lifelong benefits, about 56% indicate they would delay claiming. Without a work requirement, the average amount needed to induce delayed claiming is only $60,400, while when part-time work is stipulated, the amount is slightly higher, $66,700. This small difference implies a low utility value of leisure foregone, of under 20% of average household income.
How might retirees consider deploying the retirement assets accumulated in a defined contribution pension plan? One possibility would be to purchase an immediate annuity. Another approach, called the "phased withdrawal" strategy in the literature, would have the retiree invest his funds and then withdraw some portion of the account annually. Using this second tactic, the withdrawal rate might be determined according to a fixed benefit level payable until the retiree dies or the funds run out, or it could be set using a variable formula, where the retiree withdraws funds according to a rule linked to life expectancy. Using a range of data consistent with the German experience, we evaluate several alternative designs for phased withdrawal strategies, allowing for endogenous asset allocation patterns, and also allowing the worker to make decisions both about when to retire and when to switch to an annuity. We show that one particular phased withdrawal rule is appealing since it offers relatively low expected shortfall risk, good expected payouts for the retiree during his life, and some bequest potential for the heirs. We also find that unisex mortality tables if used for annuity pricing can make women's expected shortfalls higher, expected benefits higher, and bequests lower under a phased withdrawal program. Finally, we show that delayed annuitization can be appealing since it provides higher expected benefits with lower expected shortfalls, at the cost of somewhat lower anticipated bequests. Klassifikation: G22, G23, J26, J32, H55 . January 2004.
Implications of money-back guarantees for individual retirement accounts: protection then and now
(2019)
In the wake of the financial crisis and continued volatility in international capital markets, there is growing interest in mechanisms that can protect people against retirement account volatility. This paper explores the consequences for savers’ wellbeing of implementing market-based retirement account guarantees, using a life cycle consumption and portfolio choice model where investors have access to stocks, bonds, and tax-qualified retirement accounts. We evaluate the case of German Riester plans adopted in 2002, an individual retirement account produce that includes embedded mandatory money-back guarantees. These guarantees influenced participant consumption, saving, and investment behavior in the higher interest rate environment of that era, and they have even larger impacts in a low-return world such as the present. Importantly, we conclude that abandoning these guarantees could enhance old-age consumption for over 80% of retirees, particularly lower earners, without harming consumption during the accumulation phase. Our results are of general interest for other countries implementing default investment options in individual retirement accounts, such as the U.S. 401(k) defined contribution plans and the Pan European Pension Product (PEPP) recently launched by the European Parliament.
A recent US Treasury regulation allowed deferred longevity income annuities to be included in pension plan menus as a default payout solution, yet little research has investigated whether more people should convert some of the $15 trillion they hold in employer-based defined contribution plans into lifelong income streams. We investigate this innovation using a calibrated lifecycle consumption and portfolio choice model embodying realistic institutional considerations. Our welfare analysis shows that defaulting a small portion of retirees’ 401(k) assets (over a threshold) is an attractive way to enhance retirement security, enhancing welfare by up to 20% of retiree plan accruals.
Most defined contribution pension plans pay benefits as lump sums, yet the US Treasury has recently encouraged firms to protect retirees from outliving their assets by converting a portion of their plan balances into longevity income annuities (LIA). These are deferred annuities which initiate payouts not later than age 85 and continue for life, and they provide an effective way to hedge systematic (individual) longevity risk for a relatively low price. Using a life cycle portfolio framework, we measure the welfare improvements from including LIAs in the menu of plan payout choices, accounting for mortality heterogeneity by education and sex. We find that introducing a longevity income annuity to the plan menu is attractive for most DC plan participants who optimally commit 8-15% of their plan balances at age 65 to a LIA that starts paying out at age 85. Optimal annuitization boosts welfare by 5-20% of average retirement plan accruals at age 66 (assuming average mortality rates), compared to not having access to the LIA. We also compare the optimal LIA allocation versus two default options that plan sponsors could implement. We conclude that an approach where a fixed fraction over a dollar threshold is invested in LIAs will be preferred by most to the status quo, while enhancing welfare for the majority of workers.
We designed and fielded an experimental module in the 2014 HRS which seeks to measure older persons’ willingness to voluntarily defer claiming of Social Security benefits. In addition we evaluate the stated willingness of older individuals to work longer, depending on the Social Security incentives offered to delay claiming their benefits. Our project extends previous work by analyzing the results from our HRS module and comparing findings from other data sources, which included very much smaller samples of older persons. We show that half of the respondents would delay claiming if no work requirement were in place under the status quo, and only slightly fewer, 46 percent, with a work requirement. We also asked respondents how large a lump sum they would need with or without a work requirement. In the former case, the average amount needed to induce delayed claiming was about $60,400, while when part-time work was required, the average was $66,700. This implies a low utility value of leisure foregone of only $6,300, or about 10 percent of older households’ income.
This Chapter explores how an environment of persistent low returns influences saving, investing, and retirement behaviors, as compared to what in the past had been thought of as more “normal” financial conditions. Our calibrated lifecycle dynamic model with realistic tax, minimum distribution, and Social Security benefit rules produces results that agree with observed saving, work, and claiming age behavior of U.S. households. In particular, our model generates a large peak at the earliest claiming age at 62, as in the data. Also in line with the evidence, our baseline results show a smaller second peak at the (system-defined) Full Retirement Age of 66. In the context of a zero-return environment, we show that workers will optimally devote more of their savings to non-retirement accounts and less to 401(k) accounts, since the relative appeal of investing in taxable versus tax-qualified retirement accounts is lower in a low return setting. Finally, we show that people claim Social Security benefits later in a low interest rate environment.
Given rising life expectations around the world, it seems that old-age pension benefits will need to be cut and pension contributions boosted in many nations. Yet our research on old-age system reforms does not require raising mandatory retirement ages or contributions. Instead, we offer ways to enhance incentives for people to work longer and delay retirement. There are good reasons to incentivize older people to work longer and delay retirement. These include rising longevity, the shrinking workforce, and emerging evidence indicating that working longer can be associated with better mental and physical health for many people. Nevertheless, old age Social Security systems in many nations find that people tend to claim benefits early, usually leading to reduced benefits.In the United States, for instance, a majority of Americans claim their Social Security benefits at the earlier feasible age, namely 62, even though their monthly benefits would be 75% higher if they waited until age 70. To test whether this is the result of people underweighting the economic value of higher lifetime benefit streams, we examine whether people would claim later and work longer if they were rewarded with a lump sum instead of a higher lifetime benefit stream for deferring. Two arguments have been offered to explain early claiming. One is that workers claim early to avoid potentially “forfeiting” their deferred benefits should they die too soon (Brown et al., 2016). A second explanation is that many people underweight the economic value of lifetime benefit streams (Brown et al., 2017). This latter rationale motivates the present study.
Household decisions are profoundly shaped by a complex set of financial options due to Social Security rules determining retirement, spousal, and survivor benefits, along with benefit adjustments that vary with the age at which these are claimed. These rules influence optimal household asset allocation, insurance, and work decisions, given life cycle demographic shocks such as marriage, divorce, and children. Our model generates a wealth profile and a low and stable equity fraction consistent with empirical evidence. We also confirm predictions that wives will claim retirement benefits earlier than husbands, while life insurance is mainly purchased by younger men. Our policy simulations imply that eliminating survivor benefits would sharply reduce claiming differences by sex while dramatically increasing men’s life insurance purchases.
Social Security rules that determine retirement, spousal, and survivor benefits, along with benefit adjustments according to the age at which these are claimed, open up a complex set of financial options for household decisions. These rules influence optimal household asset allocation, insurance, and work decisions, subject to life cycle demographic shocks, such as marriage, divorce, and children. Our model-based research generates a wealth profile and a low and stable equity fraction consistent with empirical evidence. We confirm predictions that wives will claim retirement benefits earlier than husbands, while life insurance is mainly purchased by younger men. Our policy simulations imply that eliminating survivor benefits would sharply reduce claiming differences by sex while dramatically increasing men’s life insurance purchases.
We investigate the theoretical impact of including two empirically-grounded insights in a dynamic life cycle portfolio choice model. The first is to recognize that, when managing their own financial wealth, investors incur opportunity costs in terms of current and future human capital accumulation, particularly if human capital is acquired via learning by doing. The second is that we incorporate age-varying efficiency patterns in financial decisionmaking. Both enhancements produce inactivity in portfolio adjustment patterns consistent with empirical evidence. We also analyze individuals’ optimal choice between self-managing their wealth versus delegating the task to a financial advisor. Delegation proves most valuable to the young and the old. Our calibrated model quantifies welfare gains from including investment time and money costs, as well as delegation, in a life cycle setting.
Do required minimum distribution 401(k) rules matter, and for whom? Insights from a lifecylce model
(2021)
Tax-qualified vehicles helped U.S. private-sector workers accumulate $25Tr in retirement assets. An often-overlooked important institutional feature shaping decumulations from these retirement plans is the “Required Minimum Distribution” (RMD) regulation, requiring retirees to withdraw a minimum fraction from their retirement accounts or pay excise taxes on withdrawal shortfalls. Our calibrated lifecycle model measures the impact of RMD rules on financial behavior of heterogeneous households during their worklives and retirement. We show that proposed reforms to delay or eliminate the RMD rules should have little effects on consumption profiles but more impact on withdrawals and tax payments for households with bequest motives.
This paper investigates retirees’ optimal purchases of fixed and variable longevity income annuities using their defined contribution (DC) plan assets and given their expected Social Security benefits. As an alternative, we also evaluate using plan assets to boost Social Security benefits through delayed claiming. We determine that including deferred income annuities in DC accounts is welfare enhancing for all sex/education groups examined. We also show that providing access to well-designed variable deferred annuities with some equity exposure further enhances retiree wellbeing, compared to having access only to fixed annuities. Nevertheless, for the least educated, delaying claiming Social Security is preferred, whereas the most educated benefit more from using accumulated DC plan assets to purchase deferred annuities.
People who delay claiming Social Security receive higher lifelong benefits upon retirement. We survey individuals on their willingness to delay claiming later, if they could receive a lump sum in lieu of a higher annuity payment. Using a moment-matching approach, we calibrate a lifecycle model tracking observed claiming patterns under current rules and predict optimal claiming outcomes under the lump sum approach. Our model correctly predicts that early claimers under current rules would delay claiming most when offered actuarially fair lump sums, and for lump sums worth 87% as much, claiming ages would still be higher than at present.
This paper investigates whether exchanging the Social Security delayed retirement credit, currently paid as an increase in lifetime annuity benefits, for a lump sum would induce later claiming and additional work. We show that people would voluntarily claim about half a year later if the lump sum were paid for claiming any time after the Early Retirement Age, and about two-thirds of a year later if the lump sum were paid only for those claiming after their Full Retirement Age. Overall, people will work one-third to one-half of the additional months, compared to the status quo. Those who would currently claim at the youngest ages are likely to be most responsive to the offer of a lump sum benefit.
The paper discusses an additional reform proposal for enhancing Social Security solvency which reframes the existing debate in a different light. In our research, we focus on incentives to prolong working years and to delay benefits claiming as a way of sustaining Social Security. Specifically, we analyze how the offer of a budget-neutral, actuarially fair lump sum payment - instead of the current delayed retirement credit – would encourage people to delay claiming their OASI benefits and work longer. The results of our research will be useful for policymakers, namely in (1) measuring who would delay claiming benefits if offered a lump sum instead of higher annuity payments, (2) examining how long they would wait, and (3) how much longer, if at all, they would continue working in the interim.
The growth and popularity of defined contribution pensions, along with the government’s increasing attention to retirement plan costs and investment choices provided, make it important to understand how people select their retirement plan investments. This paper shows how employees in a large firm altered their fund allocations when the employer streamlined its pension fund menu and deleted nearly half of the offered funds. Using administrative data, we examine the changes in plan participant investment choices that resulted from the streamlining and how these changes might affect participants’ eventual retirement wellbeing. We show that streamlined participants’ new allocations exhibited significantly lower within-fund turnover rates and expense ratios, and we estimate this could lead to aggregate savings for these participants over a 20-year period of $20.2M, or in excess of $9,400 per participant. Moreover, after the reform, streamlined participants’ portfolios held significantly less equity and exhibited significantly lower risks by way of reduced exposures to most systematic risk factors, compared to their non-streamlined counterparts.
In the wake of the global pandemic known as COVID-19, retirees, along with those hoping to retire someday, have been shocked into a new awareness of the need for better risk management tools to handle longevity and aging. This paper offers an assessment of the status quo prior to the spread of the coronavirus, evaluates how retirement systems are faring in the wake of the shock. Next we examine insurance and financial market products that may render retirement systems more resilient for the world’s aging population. Finally, potential roles for policymakers are evaluated.
Many nations incentivize retirement saving by letting workers defer taxes on pension contributions, imposing them when retirees withdraw their funds. Using a dynamic life cycle model, we show how ‘Rothification’ – that is, taxing 401(k) contributions rather than payouts – alters saving, investment, consumption, and Social Security claiming patterns. We find that taxing pension contributions instead of withdrawals leads to delayed retirement, somewhat lower lifetime tax payments, and relatively small reductions in consumption. Indeed, the two tax regimes generate quite similar relative inequality metrics: the relative consumption inequality ratio under TEE is only four percent higher than in the EET case. Moreover, results indicate that the Gini measures are also strikingly similar under the EET and the TEE regimes for lifetime consumption, cash on hand, and 401(k) assets, differing by only 1-4 percent. While tax payments are higher early in life under the TEE regime, they are slightly lower in the long run. Moreover, higher EET tax payments are also accompanied by higher volatility. We therefore find few reasons for policymakers to favor either tax approach on egalitarian or revenue-enhancing grounds.
Many people do not understand the concepts of life expectancy and longevity risk, potentially leading them to under-save for retirement or to not purchase longevity insurance, which in turn could reduce wellbeing at older ages. We investigate alternative ways to increase the salience of both concepts, allowing us to assess whether these change peoples’ perceptions and financial decision making. Using randomly-assigned vignettes providing subjects with information about either life expectancy or longevity, we show that merely prompting people to think about financial decisions changes their perceptions regarding subjective survival probabilities. Moreover, this information also boosts respondents’ interest in saving and demand for longevity insurance. In particular, longevity information influences both subjective survival probabilities and financial decisions, while life expectancy information influences only annuity choices. We provide some evidence that many people are simply unaware of longevity risk.
Public employee pension systems throughout the developed world have traditionally been of the pay-as-you-go (PAYGO) defined benefit (DB) variety, where pensioner payments are financed by taxes (contributions) levied on the working generation. But as the number of retirees rises relative to the working-age group, such systems have begun to face financial distress. This trend has been exacerbated in many countries, among them Germany, by high unemployment rates producing further deterioration of the contribution base. In the long run, public sector pension benefits will have to be cut or contributions increased, if the systems are to be maintained. An alternative path sometimes offered to ease the crunch of paying for public employee pensions is to move toward funding: here, plan assets are gradually built up, invested, and enhanced returns devoted to partly defray civil servants’ pension costs. In this study, we evaluate the impact of introducing partial prefunding, paired with a strategic investment policy for the German federal state of Hesse. The analysis assesses the impact of introducing a supplementary tax-sponsored pension fund whose contributions are invested in the capital market and used to relieve the state budget from (some) pension payments. Our model determines the expectation and the Conditional Value-at-Risk of economic pension costs using a stochastic simulation process for pension plan assets. This approach simultaneously determines the optimal contribution rate and asset allocation that controls the expected economic costs of providing the promised pensions, while at the same time controlling investment risk. Specifically, we offer answers to the following questions: 1. How can the plan be designed to control cash-flow shortfall risk, so as to mitigate the potential burden borne by future generations of taxpayers? 2. What is the optimal asset allocation for this fund as it is built up, to generate a maximum return while simultaneously restricting capital market and liability risk? 3. What are reasonable combinations of annual contribution rates and asset allocation to a state-managed pension fund, which will limit costs of providing promised public sector pensions? We anticipate that this research will interest several sorts of policymaker groups. First, focusing on the German case, the state and Federal governments should find it relevant, as these entities face considerable public sector pension liabilities. Second, our findings will also be of interest to other European countries, as most have substantial underfunded defined benefit plans for civil servants. In what follows, we first offer a brief description of the structure of civil servant pensions in Germany, focusing on their benefit formulas, their financing, and the resulting current as well as future plan obligations for taxpayers. Next, we turn to an analysis of the actuarial status of the Hesse civil servants’ pension plan and evaluate how much would have to be contributed to fund this plan in a nonstochastic context. Subsequently we evaluate the asset-liability and decision-making process from the viewpoint of the plan sponsor, to determine sensible plan asset allocation behavior. A final section summarizes findings and implications.
Retirees confront the difficult problem of how to manage their money in retirement so as to not outlive their funds while continuing to invest in capital markets. We posit a dynamic utility maximizer who makes both asset location and allocation decisions when managing her retirement financial wealth and annuities, and we prove that she can benefit from both the equity premium and longevity insurance in her retirement portfolio. Even without bequests, she will not fully annuitize; rather, her optimal stock allocation amounts initially to more than half of her financial wealth and declines with age. Welfare gains from this strategy can amount to 40 percent of financial wealth (depending on risk parameters and other resources). In practice, it turns out that many retirees will do almost as well by purchasing a variable annuity invested 60/40 in stocks/bonds. JEL Classification: G11, G23, G22, D14, J26, H55
Economists are beginning to investigate the causes and consequences of financial illiteracy to better understand why retirement planning is lacking and why so many households arrive close to retirement with little or no wealth. Our review reveals that many households are unfamiliar with even the most basic economic concepts needed to make saving and investment decisions. Such financial illiteracy is widespread: the young and older people in the United States and other countries appear woefully under-informed about basic financial concepts, with serious implications for saving, retirement planning, mortgages, and other decisions. In response, governments and several nonprofit organizations have undertaken initiatives to enhance financial literacy. The experience of other countries, including a saving campaign in Japan as well as the Swedish pension privatization program, offers insights into possible roles for financial literacy and saving programs. JEL Classification: D80, D91, G11
Many older US households have done little or no planning for retirement, and there is a substantial population that seems to undersave for retirement. Of particular concern is the relative position of older women, who are more vulnerable to old-age poverty due to their longer longevity. This paper uses data from a special module we devised on planning and financial literacy in the 2004 Health and Retirement Study. It shows that women display much lower levels of financial literacy than the older population as a whole. In addition, women who are less financially literate are also less likely to plan for retirement and be successful planners. These findings have important implications for policy and for programs aimed at fostering financial security at older ages.
Do required minimum distribution 401(k) rules matter, and for whom? Insights from a lifecycle model
(2023)
Tax-qualified vehicles have helped U.S. private-sector workers accumulate $33Tr in retirement plans. An often-overlooked important institutional feature shaping decumulations from these plans is the “Required Minimum Distribution” (RMD) regulation requiring retirees to withdraw a minimum fraction from their retirement accounts or pay excise taxes on withdrawal shortfalls. Our calibrated lifecycle model measures the impact of RMD rules on heterogeneous households’ financial behavior during their work lives and in retirement. The model shows that reforms delaying or eliminating the RMD rules have little effect on consumption profiles, but they would influence withdrawals and tax payments for households with bequest motives.
Baby boomer retirement security: the roles of planning, financial literacy and housing wealth
(2006)
We compare wealth holdings across two cohorts of the Health and Retirement Study: the early Baby Boomers in 2004, and individuals in the same age group in 1992. Levels and patterns of total net worth have changed relatively little over time, though Boomers rely more on housing equity than their predecessors. Most important, planners in both cohorts arrive close to retirement with much higher wealth levels and display higher financial literacy than non-planners. Instrumental variables estimates show that planning behavior can explain the differences in savings and why some people arrive close to retirement with very little or no wealth. Klassifizierung: D91, E21
Life insurers use accounting and actuarial techniques to smooth reporting of firm assets and liabilities, seeking to transfer surpluses in good years to cover benefit payouts in bad years. Yet these techniques have been criticized as they make it difficult to assess insurers’ true financial status. We develop stylized and realistically-calibrated models of a participating life annuity, an insurance product that pays retirees guaranteed lifelong benefits along with variable non-guaranteed surplus. Our goal is to illustrate how accounting and actuarial techniques for this type of financial contract shape policyholder wellbeing, along with insurer profitability and stability. Smoothing adds value to both the annuitant and the insurer, so curtailing smoothing could undermine the market for long-term retirement payout products.
This paper examines heterogeneity in time discounting among a representative sample of elderly Americans, as well as its role in explaining key economic behaviors at older ages. We show how older Americans evaluate simple (hypothetical) inter-temporal choices in which payments today are compared with payments in the future. Using the indicators derived from this measure, we then demonstrate that differences in discounting patterns are associated with characteristics of particular importance in elderly populations. For example, cognitive deficits are associated with greater impatience, whereas bequest motives are associated with less impatience. We then relate our discounting measure to key economic outcomes and find that impatience is associated with lower wealth, fewer investments in health, and less planning for end of life care.
We investigate how financial literacy shapes older Americans’ demand for financial advice. Using an experimental module fielded in the Health and Retirement Study, we show that financial literacy strongly improves the quality but not the quantity of financial advice sought. In particular, more financially literate people seek financial help from professionals. This effect is more pronounced among older people and those with more wealth and more complex financial positions. Our analysis result implies that financial literacy and financial advisory services are complementary with, rather than substitutes for, each other.
The US Treasury recently permitted deferred longevity income annuities to be included in pension plan menus as a default payout solution, yet little research has investigated whether more people should convert some of the $18 trillion they hold in employer-based defined contribution plans into lifelong income streams. We investigate this innovation using a calibrated lifecycle consumption and portfolio choice model embodying realistic institutional considerations. Our welfare analysis shows that defaulting a modest portion of retirees’ 401(k) assets (over a threshold) is an attractive way to enhance retirement security, enhancing welfare by up to 20% of retiree plan accruals.