What you don't know can't help you
Subtitle: pension knowledge and retirement decision making
By: Sewin Chan, Ann Huff Stevens.
Contributors: Stevens, Ann Huff.; National Bureau of Economic Research.
Series: NBER working paper series ;; working paper 10185; Working paper series (National Bureau of Economic Research : Online) ;; working paper no. 10185.
Publisher: National Bureau of Economic Research
Published: 2003
Place of publication: Cambridge, MA
Language: eng
Format: Electronic resource
Subjects: Pensions.; Retirement -- Decision making.
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.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references.
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