Most defined contribution pension plans pay benefits as lump sums, yet the US Treasury has recently encouraged firms to protect retirees from outliving their assets by converting a portion of their plan balances into ...

In a field study with more than 1.500 customers of an online-broker we test what happens when investors receive repeated feedback on their investment success in a monthly securities account report. The reports show investors’ ...

People who delay claiming Social Security receive higher lifelong benefits upon retirement. We survey individuals on their willingness to delay claiming later, if they could receive a lump sum in lieu of a higher annuity ...

This paper studies how disruptions to personal sources of financing, aside from commercial lending supply shocks, impair the survival and growth of small businesses. Entrepreneurs holding deposit accounts at retail banking ...

"On average young people ""undersave"" whereas old people ""oversave"" with respect to the rational expectations model of life-cycle consumption and savings. According to numerous studies on subjective survival beliefs, ...

We designed and fielded an experimental module in the 2014 HRS which seeks to measure older persons’ willingness to voluntarily defer claiming of Social Security benefits. In addition we evaluate the stated willingness of ...

We propose a 2-country asset-pricing model where agents' preferences change endogenously as a function of the popularity of internationally traded goods. We determine the effect of the time-variation of preferences on ...

This paper studies a consumption-portfolio problem where money enters the agent's utility function. We solve the corresponding Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation and provide closed-form solutions for the optimal consumption ...

This Chapter explores how an environment of persistent low returns influences saving, investing, and retirement behaviors, as compared to what in the past had been thought of as more “normal” financial conditions. Our ...

This paper studies heterogeneity in the reaction to rank feedback. In a laboratory experiment, individuals take part in a series of dynamic real-effort contests with intermediate feedback. To solve the identification problem ...