@techreport{NBERw10185,
 title = "What You Don't Know Can't Help You: Pension Knowledge and Retirement Decision Making",
 author = "Sewin Chan and Ann Huff Stevens",
 institution = "National Bureau of Economic Research",
 type = "Working Paper",
 series = "Working Paper Series",
 number = "10185",
 year = "2003",
 month = "December",
 URL = "http://www.nber.org/papers/w10185",
 abstract = {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.},
}