TY  - JOUR
AU  - Duflo,Esther
AU  - Saez,Emmanuel
TI  - Participation and Investment Decisions in a Retirement Plan: The Influence of Colleagues' Choices
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 7735
PY  - 2000
Y2  - June 2000
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w7735
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w7735.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Esther Duflo
Department of Economics
MIT, E52-252G
50 Memorial Drive
Cambridge, MA 02142
Tel: 617/258-7013
Fax: 617/253-6915
E-Mail: eduflo@mit.edu

Emmanuel Saez
Department of Economics
University of California, Berkeley
530 Evans Hall #3880
Berkeley, CA 94720
Tel: 510/642-4631
Fax: 510/642-6615
E-Mail: saez@econ.berkeley.edu
AB  - This paper investigates whether peer effects play an important role in retirement savings decisions.  We use individual data from the staff of a university to study whether individual decisions to enroll in a Tax Deferred Account plan sponsored by the university (and the choice of the mutual fund vendor for people who choose to enroll) are affected by the decisions of other employees in the same department.  To overcome the identification problems, we separate the departments into sub-groups (along gender, status, age, and tenure lines) and we instrument the average participation of each peer group by the salary or tenure structure in this group.  Our results suggest that peer effects are important.  We find significant own-group peer effect on participation and on vendor's choice, but no cross-group peer effects.
ER  -