Collaborative Research: How Does Knowledge Affect Behavior? The Role of Pension Knowledge in Retirement-Related Decisions

本项目考察了个人对养老金和社会保障福利的了解对几个重大经济决策的重要性。现在有明确的证据表明，许多老年工人不知道他们的养老金计划的细节，也不知道他们退休后有资格获得的福利。然而，大多数关于退休相关决策的经济研究都使用了个人自己可能无法完全理解的行政数据。我们的项目重点是了解这些对养老金和社会保障的误解是如何直接影响退休和相关决策的。由于潜在的政策变化将与不同程度的透明度和公众知识相关，如果我们要准确预测个人对退休收入计划的反应，了解知识如何与退休收入计划相互作用是至关重要的。这个项目将在几个方面以我们以前的工作为基础。我们将继续并扩展我们对退休决定及其与知识的关系的分析，通过(i)使用实际养老金福利的新措施，然后可以将其与基于退休前个人看法的措施进行比较，（ii）通过分析退休本身和退休预期，（iii）通过扩大我们利用的健康与退休研究的数据年数。这些步骤将使我们进一步了解个人对退休收入的了解或缺乏了解如何影响美国老年人的决策。

This project examines the importance of individual knowledge of pensions and Social Security benefits for several major economic decisions. There is now clear evidence that many older workers do not know their pension plan details or the benefits they are eligible for upon retirement. However, most economic research on retirement related decisions uses administrative data that the individuals themselves may not fully understand. Our project focuses on understanding the ways in which these misperceptions about pensions and Social Security directly affect retirement and related decisions. Because potential policy changes will be associated with different levels of transparency and public knowledge, it is crucial to understand how knowledge interacts with retirement income programs if we are to accurately predict how individuals respond to such programs. The project will build on our previous work in several ways. We will continue and extend our analysis of the retirement decision and its relationship to knowledge by (i) using new measures of actual pension benefits received that can then be compared to those based on individual perceptions prior to retirement, (ii) by analyzing both retirement itself and retirement expectations, (iii) by expanding the number of years of data from the Health and Retirement Study that we utilize. These steps will allow us to expand our understanding of how individual knowledge about retirement income, or lack thereof, affects the decisions made by older Americans.