Dynamics of Personal Social Security & Pension Knowledge

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Whether people reach retirement with adequate resources is a major concern. Several studies investigated this issue by looking at economic outcomes; others focused on retirement planning activities, or workers' pension knowledge at a moment in time. However, little is known about the time-path of individual information on Social Security and pensions and to what extent people acquire more information as they approach retirement. This research takes a dynamic approach studying the evolution of individuals' expectations about their Social Security and pension benefits and subsequent receipts observed in the Health and Retirement Study. It will study time-trends in expected benefits from Social Security and private pensions and compare them to observed outcomes in subsequent waves; assess how respondents account for inflation in their answers about expected benefit receipts; investigate the relation of expected starting ages of benefit receipt with expected retirement ages; assess the importance of uncertainty and its evolution as people approach retirement by considering trends in item non-response, focal responses and anchoring bias; and investigate how poor knowledge relates to bad retirement outcomes. It will explore possible implications of the observed patterns in the dynamics of personal Social Security and pension knowledge for behavioral models of information acquisition.