In aggregate, individual retirement savings are reaching unprecedented levels, totaling about $25 trillion. Yet there is considerable variation in retirement wealth across individuals even after taking into account background characteristics, such as age, income, and education. Because changes in More information...

Automatic enrollment has been widely embraced for raising employee participation in 401(k) plans. However, the empirical evidence is based on data with limitations that, up until now, have prevented researchers from extrapolating the effects of automatic enrollment to the broader population of More information...

We propose a model of narrow framing in insurance and test it using data from a new module we designed and fielded in the Health and Retirement Study. We show that respondents subject to narrow framing are substantially less likely to buy long-term care insurance than average. This effect is much More information...

Researchers have become increasingly interested in understanding the sources of heterogeneity in individual financial behaviors. In this paper, we examine how the Big Five personality traits are related to measures of young adults’ financial distress. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study More information...

We provide new and robust empirical evidence that procrastinators behave differently than non‐procrastinators for five important retirement‐related financial behaviors. Empirically, we define a procrastinator as an individual who waits until the last day of their health care open enrollment More information...

A report, Opportunities to Improve the Financial Capability and Financial Wellbeing of Postsecondary Students, has been prepared by the Financial Literacy and Education Commission (FLEC) and describes the state of financial education among postsecondary students. The report describes current More information...

This report describes several linked empirical studies that examine the activities of public libraries in increasing the financial literacy of their service population. It describes a qualitative field study of librarians’ perceptions of the challenges in offering financial literacy-based More information...

PISA 2012 is the first large-scale international study to assess the financial literacy, learned in and outside of school, of 15-year-olds nearing the end of compulsory education. It assesses the extent to which students in 18 participating countries and economies have the knowledge and skills that More information...

This paper examines responses from a survey of 2,000 randomly selected mutual fund investors who purchased shares from six different distribution channels. The survey provides data on the demographic, financial, and fund ownership characteristics of mutual fund investors. It also provides data on More information...

Though millions of US workers have 401(k) plans, few studies evaluate participant investment performance. Using data on over 1,000 401(k) plans and their participants, we identify key portfolio investment inefficiencies and attribute them to offered investment menus versus individual portfolio More information...