Retirement Savings, Subjective Expectations and Survey Measurement

描述(申请人提供)：该项目旨在揭示人们的期望对他们的退休储蓄的影响。特别是，我们关注对股市回报的预期是否以及如何影响股票和共同基金在家庭储蓄中的份额，包括退休账户。健康和退休研究收集有关储蓄和股市预期的数据，后者是以主观概率问题的形式得出的。以前的研究表明，这些问题的答案包含有用的信息，但它们也非常嘈杂。在这项研究中，我们计划建立在Hill，Perry和Willis(2005)发展的分析概率问题的新方法的基础上。我们关注人们对股市表现的预期，并将其与他们的投资决策进行对比。我们计划将Hill、Perry和Willis的方法推广到更复杂的情况，并在可能的情况下，将与重要决策相关的异质性与回答调查问题的错误所独有的异质性分开。我们还通过在调查响应、经济模型和观察到的行为之间建立更明确的联系来扩展他们的工作。我们的结果可能解释了为什么人们持有如此少的股票，因为我们将预期(例如，乐观和不确定性)与储蓄的构成联系起来。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This project aims at uncovering the effect of people's expectations on their retirement savings. In particular, we focus on whether and how expectations about stock market returns affect the share of stocks and mutual funds in household savings, including retirement accounts. The Health and Retirement Study collects data on savings and stock market expectations, the latter elicited in forms of subjective probability questions. Previous research has shown that answers to these questions contain useful information but they are also very noisy. In this research, we plan to build on the novel approach to analyzing probability questions developed by Hill, Perry and Willis (2005). We focus on people's expectations about the performance of the stock market and contrast those to their investment decisions. We plan to generalize the approach of Hill, Perry and Willis to more complex situations, and to the extent it's possible, separate heterogeneity that is relevant for important decisions from heterogeneity unique to errors in answering survey questions. We also extend their work by making a more explicit connection between survey response, economic model and observed behavior. Our results may explain why people hold so few stocks by relating expectations (e.g. optimism and uncertainty) to the composition of savings.