Publication Date

6-9-2020

Publisher

Social Policy Institute at Washington University in St. Louis

Summary

Many U.S. households—especially those with low- to moderate-incomes (LMI)—struggle to save for retirement. To address this issue, the Department of the Treasury launched myRA, a no-fee retirement account designed primarily to help people who lacked access to employer-sponsored plans build retirement savings. In this paper, we report findings from two myRA-focused field experiments, both of which were administered to well over 100,000 LMI online tax filers before and during the 2016 tax season. The first experiment involved sending one of three different myRA-focused email messages to tax filers immediately prior to tax season, and the second experiment involved incorporating myRA-focused messages and choice architecture directly into an online tax filing platform. Messages were chosen to address different barriers to retirement savings LMI households may face. We find that, though the general level of interest in myRA was very low in this population, interest and enrollment in myRA depends heavily on the way in which the benefits of the accounts are framed. Results from both experiments indicate that messages emphasizing the possibility of receiving a larger refund in the future were the most effective at increasing interest in myRA, while messages focused around the simplicity and ease of use of the accounts were less effective. We also conduct several subsample analyses to investigate the extent to which these effects differed by key household characteristics.

Document Type

Working Paper

Notes

This document is the unedited author’s version of a submitted work that was subsequently accepted for publication in Journal of Pension Economics & Finance, copyright ©️ 2021, after peer review. To access the final edited and published work see https://doi.org/10.1017/S1474747221000317

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.7936/af7k-1390

Project

Refund to Savings (R2S)

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