What You Don't Know Can't Help You: Pension Knowledge and Retirement Decision-Making

By Sewin Chan, A. H. Stevens. Review of Economics and Statistics, 2008

251 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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 and document an important role for self-reported pension data in determining retirement behavior. Well-informed individuals are far more responsive to pension incentives than the average individual. Ill-informed individuals seem to respond systematically to their own misperceptions of pension incentives.

Subfields: Accounting, Demography, General Health Professions

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6bdeb878c782326470161864aad1dee9df4d8041

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Citations in the corpus

Framing Social Security Reform: Behavioral Responses to Changes in the Full Retirement Age (2012, background): “22 see the discussions by Burtless, 2004; Liebman et al., 2008; and the empirical applications in Coile et al., 2002, and Chan and Stevens, 2008).”
Mapping the Minds of Retirement Planners (2007, background): “planning activities (Ekerdt & Hackney, 2002), financial saving practices ( Chan & Stevens, 2003;”
The Economic Importance of Financial Literacy: Theory and Evidence (2014, unknown): “…more financially knowledgeable are also better informed about pension system rules, pay lower investment fees in their retirement accounts, and diversify their pension assets better (Arenas de Mesa, Bravo, Behrman, Mitchell, and Todd 2008; Chan and Stevens 2008; Hastings, Mitchell, and Chyn 2011).”
Financial literacy, financial advice, and financial behavior (2017, background): “…strand of literature has also documented a positive relation between financial literacy and savings behavior (e.g., Lusardi and Mitchell 2011c; Chan and Stevens 2008; Behrman et al. 2012), i.e. providing additional evidence that financially literate individuals exhibit a greater tendency to…”
Re-engaging with rationality in economic geography: behavioural approaches and the importance of context in decision-making (2007, background): “…passivity and procrastination in decision-making (Choi et al., 2001, 2003), choice overload (Iyengar et al., 2004), lack of response to incentives (Chan and Stevens, 2003; Choi et al., 2005) and gender differences in decision-making and attitudes towards risk (Bajtelsmit et al., 1999; Bernasek…”
Financial Literacy, Retirement Planning and Household Wealth† (2012, unknown): “Somewhat related to the subject of our study is the work by Chan and Stevens (2008) who document that households base pension and retirement saving decisions upon limited and sometimes incorrect pension knowledge.”
Impact of Financial Literacy and Investment Experience on Risk Tolerance and Investment Decisions: Empirical Evidence from Pakistan (2016, background): “(Chan and Stevens, 2008) presented that individual running homes making pension and retirement saving decisions on basis of limited and oftentimes pension knowledge which is not right.”