Retirement Savings, Subjective Expectations and Survey Measurement

项目描述（由申请人提供）：该项目旨在揭示人们对退休储蓄的期望。特别是，我们专注于对股票市场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（包括退休账户）中的份额。健康与退休研究收集了关于储蓄和股票市场预期的数据，后者以主观概率问题的形式引出。先前的研究表明，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，我们计划建立在希尔，佩里和威利斯（2005年）开发的新方法来分析概率问题。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。我们计划将希尔、佩里和威利斯的方法推广到更复杂的情况，并在可能的范围内，将与重要决策相关的异质性与回答调查问题时的错误所特有的异质性分开。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。我们的研究结果可以解释为什么人们持有这么少的股票，相关的预期（如乐观和不确定性）的储蓄组成。

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.