TY - JOUR AU - Beshears,John AU - Choi,James J. AU - Laibson,David AU - Madrian,Brigitte C. TI - The Impact of Employer Matching on Savings Plan Participation under Automatic Enrollment JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 13352 PY - 2007 Y2 - August 2007 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w13352 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w13352.pdf N1 - Author contact info: John Beshears Stanford Graduate School of Business 655 Knight Way Stanford, CA 94305-7298 Tel: 650/723-6792 E-Mail: beshears@stanford.edu James J. Choi Yale School of Management 135 Prospect Street P.O. Box 208200 New Haven, CT 06520-8200 E-Mail: james.choi@yale.edu David Laibson Department of Economics Littauer M-12 Harvard University Cambridge, MA 02138 Tel: 617/496-3402 Fax: 617/495-8570 E-Mail: dlaibson@gmail.com Brigitte C. Madrian John F. Kennedy School of Government Harvard University 79 JFK Street Cambridge, MA 02138 Tel: 617-495-8917 Fax: 617-496-5960 E-Mail: Brigitte_Madrian@Harvard.edu M1 - published as John Beshears, James J. Choi, David Laibson, Brigitte C. Madrian. "The Impact of Employer Matching on Savings Plan Participation under Automatic Enrollment," in David A. Wise, editor, "Research Findings in the Economics of Aging" University of Chicago Press (2010) AB - Existing research has documented the large impact that automatic enrollment has on savings plan participation. All the companies examined in these studies, however, have combined automatic enrollment with an employer match. This raises a question about how effective automatic enrollment would be without a direct financial inducement not to opt out of participation. This paper's results suggest that the match has only a modest impact on opt-out rates. We estimate that moving from a typical matching structure - a match of 50% up to 6% of pay contributed - to no match would reduce participation under automatic enrollment at six months after plan eligibility by 5 to 11 percentage points. Our analysis includes a firm that switched from a match to a non-contingent employer contribution. This firm's experience suggests that non-contingent employer contributions only weakly crowd out employee participation. ER -