Frames, Incentives, and Education: Effectiveness of Interventions to Delay Public Pension Claiming
In many retirement income systems, people forgo a higher stream of public pension income by claiming early. We provide both survey-experimental and quasi-experimental evidence that the timing of public pension claiming is relatively inelastic to changes in financial incentives. Using the survey experiment, we evaluate the effect of two different educational interventions and different ways of framing the decision on the present value of participants' expected pension payments. While all three types of interventions induce delays, these interventions have heterogeneous financial consequences. Educating participants leads to claiming ages with higher pension wealth. In contrast, framing and financial incentives do not improve, and even worsen, financial outcomes. Understanding the impact of various policy tools on expected pension wealth is essential for designing policies to delay claiming.
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