Featured Researcher: Angelino Viceisza
It was a long and winding road from Angelino Viceisza’s accounting studies at the University of Curaçao to his recent presidency of the National Economic Association and his current status as a tenured professor of economics at Spelman College and codirector of the NBER’s Retirement and Disability Research Center (RDRC).
Viceisza (pronounced vee-say-za), who is on leave from Spelman, is currently the Phyllis Wallace Visiting Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management and a member of MIT’s Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Visiting Professors and Scholars Program.
“I ended up where I am now more by luck and chance than by some overarching plan,” he says. “I find that’s true with lots of economists.”
“I started out following in my sister’s footsteps because I didn’t know what I wanted to do,” he says. “When I finished the bachelor’s degree, I didn’t want to work as an accountant. I did a master’s in international business, and didn’t find that exciting either. A friend from undergraduate days said, ‘You were good with statistics, have you thought about economics?’ I didn’t know there was such a thing as a PhD in economics.”
A behavioral and experimental economist with interests in development, household finance, and entrepreneurship, Viceisza followed his PhD studies with a research position at the International Food Policy Research Institute, designing and conducting field experiments in El Salvador, Ethiopia, Peru, the United States, and other countries. A study of inequality in the retirement outcomes of Blacks, Hispanics, and lower-income Whites led to his current Social Security Administration-funded NBER project to design a digital retirement outreach program that could have a positive impact on those groups.
The most exciting part of Viceisza’s current work, he says, is helping people understand their personal Social Security statements and exploring ways to encourage them to “plan and save for retirement sooner rather than later.” A key to designing retirement outreach interventions that cater to the needs of specific demographic groups, he and his NBER-study coauthors write, is “…embracing the fact that Blacks, Hispanics, and Whites have different preferences for information acquisition and rely on different types of preexisting social networks.”
At Spelman, a historically Black college for women, Viceisza founded and directs VLab, a virtual lab that engages students in research experiences. He has extended that effort to his RDRC project, which incorporates student mentees as research assistants. He has also expanded the effort in another project, this one with RDRC director Nicole Maestas, to build research capacity on retirement and disability policy at historically Black colleges and universities, including helping faculty at those schools secure SSA funding for research projects.
