TY - JOUR AU - Poterba,James M. AU - Venti,Steven F. AU - Wise,David A. TI - Do 401(k) Contributions Crowd Out Other Persoanl Saving? JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 4391 PY - 1996 Y2 - January 1996 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w4391 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w4391.pdf N1 - Author contact info: James M. Poterba Department of Economics MIT, E52-350 50 Memorial Drive Cambridge, MA 02142-1347 Tel: 617/253-6673 Fax: 617/258-7804 E-Mail: poterba@nber.org Steven F. Venti Department of Economics 6106 Rockefeller Center Dartmouth College Hanover, NH 03755 Tel: 603/646-2526 Fax: 603/646-2122 E-Mail: steven.f.venti@dartmouth.edu David A. Wise Harvard Kennedy School 79 John F. Kennedy Cambridge, MA 02138 E-Mail: dwise@nber.org M2 - featured in NBER digest on 1994-01-01 AB - During the late 1980s. contributions to 401(k) plans eclipsed contributions to Individual Retirement Accounts as the leading form of tax-deferred individual retirement saving. This paper uses data from the 1984. 1987. and 1991 Surveys of Income and Program Participation to describe patterns of participation in and contributions to 401(k) plans. and to evaluate the net impact of these contributions on personal saving. We find that 401(k) participation conditional on eligibility exceeds sixty percent at all income levels. This pattern contrasts with Individual Retirement Accounts in the early 1980s. which exhibited a sharply rising profile of participation across income groups. We study the net effect of 401(k) contributions on personal saving by comparing the growth of non-401(k) assets for contributors and noncontributors. and by comparing the level of wealth for families who are eligible for 401(k)s with that of those who are not. We find little evidence that 401(k) contributions substitute for other forms of private saving. We also explore the substitutability of 401(k) contributions for IRA contributions. and revisit the question of whether IRAs substitute for other types of saving. Our findings suggest little substitution on either margin. ER -