Mitchell, Olivia S
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Publication Public Sector Pension Plans: Lessons and Challenges for the Twenty-First Century(2000-01-01) Hustead, Edwin C.; Mitchell, Olivia SPublication Testing Methods to Enhance Longevity Awareness(2020-11-02) Hurwitz, Abigail; Mitchell, Olivia S; Sade, OrlyMany people have only a vague notion of the concept of life expectancy and the longevity risk they face at older ages, which in turn implies that they are likely to undersave for retirement. This paper employs an online experiment to investigate alternative ways to describe both life expectancy and longevity risk, with the goal of assessing whether these can raise peoples’ awareness of possible retirement shortfalls. We also evaluate whether providing this information promotes interest in saving activity and demand for longevity insurance products. We find that providing longevity risk information impacts respondents’ subjective survival probabilities, while simply describing average life expectancy does not. Yet providing life expectancy or longevity information significantly affects financial decisions, mostly regarding annuitization. Interestingly, we also find that merely prompting people to think about financial decisions changes their perceptions regarding subjective survival probabilities.Publication Complexity as a Barrier to Annuitization: Do Consumers Know How to Value Annuities?(2013-03-01) Brown, Jeffrey R; Kapteyn, Arie; Luttmer, Erzo FP; Mitchell, Olivia SThis paper provides experimental evidence that individuals have difficulty valuing annuities, and this difficulty – rather than a preference for lump sums – can help explain observed low levels of annuity purchases. Although the median price at which people are willing to sell an annuity is close to median actuarial values, this masks notable heterogeneity in responses including substantial numbers of respondents whose responses are difficult to reconcile with optimizing behavior under any reasonable parameter assumptions. We also discover that people are willing to pay substantially less to buy a larger annuity, a result not due to liquidity constraints or endowment effects. Strikingly, we also learn that individual responses to the buy versus sell decisions are negatively correlated, an effect that is stronger for the less financially sophisticated. Our findings are consistent with boundedly rational consumers who adopt a “buy low, sell high” heuristic when faced with a complex trade-off. Moreover, at the margin, subjective valuations vary nearly one-for-one with actuarial values but are uncorrelated with utility-based measures designed to measure the insurance value of annuities. This supports the hypothesis that people use simplifying heuristics to think about annuities, rather than engaging in optimizing behavior. Results also underscore the difficulty of explaining the cross-sectional variation in annuity valuations using standard empirical models. Our findings raise doubt about whether most consumers can make optimal decisions about annuitization.Publication How Financial Literacy and Impatience Shape Retirement Wealth and Investment Behaviors(2018-08-12) Hastings, Justine S; Mitchell, Olivia STwo competing explanations for why consumers have trouble with financial decisions are gaining momentum. One is that people are financially illiterate since they lack understanding of simple economic concepts and cannot carry out computations such as computing compound interest, which could cause them to make suboptimal financial decisions. A second is that impatience or present-bias might explain suboptimal financial decisions. That is, some people persistently choose immediate gratification instead of taking advantage of larger long-term payoffs. We use experimental evidence from Chile to explore how these factors appear related to poor financial decisions. Our results show that our measure of impatience is a strong predictor of wealth and investment in health. Financial literacy is also correlated with wealth though it appears to be a weaker predictor of sensitivity to framing in investment decisions. Policymakers interested in enhancing retirement wellbeing would do well to consider the importance of both factors.Publication Planning and Financial Literacy: How Do Women Fare?(2007-08-01) Lusardi, Annamaria; Mitchell, Olivia SMany older US households have done little or no planning for retirement, and there is a substantial population that seems to undersave for retirement. Of particular concern is the relative position of older women, who are more vulnerable to old-age poverty due to their longer longevity. This paper uses data from a special module we devised on planning and financial literacy in the 2004 Health and Retirement Study. The evidence indicates that women display much lower levels of financial literacy than the older population as a whole. In addition, women who are less financially literate are also less likely to plan for retirement and be successful planners. These findings have important implications for policy and for programs aimed at fostering financial security at older ages.Publication Factors Influencing the Choice of Pension Distribution at Retirement(2022-05-01) Clark, Robert L.; Mitchell, Olivia SOne of the most important financial decisions that pension participants make concerns how they access their pension assets when they terminate employment with their plan sponsor. Their choices depend both on own preferences and the options offered by their retirement plan. This paper examines both past and future pension withdrawal choices for those with defined benefit and defined contribution pensions, separately. Our data are drawn from a set of pension distribution questions we fielded in the Understanding American Study. Results show significant differences in distribution choices based on the type of retirement plan, with individuals covered by defined benefit plans significantly more likely to select annuities compared to similar employees covered by defined contribution plans. We also find differences in how higher annual income affects annuity choices based on coverage by DB plans. Individuals with lower levels of financial literacy and lower annual income have less knowledge of basic pension characteristics.Publication Lessons from Behavioral Finance for Retirement Plan Design(2003-01-01) Mitchell, Olivia S; Utkus, Stephen PThis paper evaluates some of the key lessons of behavioral economics and finance research over the last decade for pension plan design. We divide the discussion into the natural phases of the retirement saving life cycle: accumulation, investment, and decumulation. After reviewing the lessons of behavioral finance, we conclude by outlining plan design alternatives that would be of use to plan sponsors and policymakers seeking to design more cost-effective and efficient retirement plans for the future.Publication Managing Public Investment Funds: Best Practices and New Challenges(2008-07-01) Mitchell, Olivia S; Piggott, John; Kumru, CagriLarge publicly-held pools of assets are playing an increasingly prominent role in the global investment arena. We compare three distinct forms of such public funds, namely foreign exchange reserve funds, sovereign wealth funds, and public pension funds, to highlight their differences and similarities. We review previous studies on ways to better secure prudent and economically sound public fund management practices in these funds, as well as how to evaluate their governance and investment policies and how to better protect the assets from political interference. Drawing from the pension and corporate finance literature, we also link their management to governance practices and country-specific characteristics, and contrast those with empirical findings on linkages with corporate governance.Publication Health Problems as Determinants of Retirement: Are Self-Rated Measures Endogenous?(1998-03-01) Dwyer, Debra Sabatini; Mitchell, Olivia S.We explore alternative measures of unobserved health status in order to identify effects of mental and physical capacity for work on older men’s retirement. Traditional self-ratings of poor health are tested against more objectively measured instruments. Using the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), we find that health problems influence retirement plans more strongly than do economic variables. Specifically, men in poor overall health expected to retire one to two years earlier, an effect that persists after correcting for potential endogeneity of self-rated health problems. The effects of detailed health problems are also examined in depth.Publication Racial and Ethnic Differences in Longevity Perceptions and Implications for Financial Decision-Making(2022-05-24) Hurwitz, Abigail; Sade, Orly; Mitchell, Olivia S.Inaccurate perceptions regarding life expectancy can lead to suboptimal financial decisions with long-term consequences, including undersaving prior to retirement, and overspending during retirement. As prior research suggests that Covid-19 mortality has disproportionately harmed those with low incomes, African Americans, and Hispanics in the United States, we seek to determine whether subjective survival perceptions among these groups changed in a manner consistent with observed outcomes. We fielded two online experimental surveys of US residents: one took place early in the pandemic outbreak, and the second, a year later. Using vignettes, we examine whether minorities’ perceptions regarding longevity at the outbreak were consistent with observed reality, and how these compared to members of the white majority population. Furthermore, the panel aspect of our study enables us to test whether and how these perceptions updated over time during the pandemic. Finally, we show how these perceptions related to advice regarding retirement saving and drawdowns.