TY  - JOUR
AU  - Chan,Sewin
AU  - Stevens,Ann Huff
TI  - What You Don't Know Can't Help You: Pension Knowledge and Retirement Decision Making
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 10185
PY  - 2003
Y2  - December 2003
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w10185
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w10185.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Sewin Chan
Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service
New York University
295 Lafayette Street - 2nd floor
New York, NY 10012
Tel: 212/998-7495
Fax: 212/995-3890
E-Mail: sewin.chan@nyu.edu

Ann Huff Stevens
Department of Economics
One Shields Avenue
University of California, Davis
Davis, CA  95616
Tel: 530/752-3034
E-Mail: annstevens@ucdavis.edu
AB  - 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.
ER  -