We study how couples allocate retirement-saving contributions across each spouse's account. In a new dataset covering over a million US individuals, we find retirement contributions are not allocated to the account with the highest employer match rate. This lack of coordination—which goes against the assumptions of most models of household decision-making—is common, costly, persistent over time, and cannot be explained by inertia, auto-enrollment, or simple heuristics. Complementing the administrative evidence with an online survey, we find that inefficient allocations reflect both financial mistakes as well as deliberate choices, especially when trust and commitment inside the households are weak.
Pareto Efficiency is a core assumption of most models of household decision-making. We test this assumption using a new dataset covering the retirement saving contributions of over a million U.S. individuals. While a vast literature has failed to reject household efficiency in developed countries, we find evidence of widespread inefficiency in our setting: retirement contributions are not allocated to the account of the spouse with the highest employer match rate. This lack of coordination cannot be explained by inertia, auto-enrollment, or simple heuristics. Instead, we find that indicators of weaker marital commitment correlate with the incidence of inefficient allocations.
This paper documents, using a newly-constructed data set, the evolution of the characteristics of employer-sponsored DC schemes. The features we focus on are their match schedules, vesting schedules, and the extent of ‘auto-features’ (i.e. presence of auto-enrollment, the level of any default contribution, and presence and details of auto-escalation). The data we construct is formed by hand-coding the details in narrative plan descriptions attached to plan fillings. Our data covers approximately 5,000 plans, covering up to 37 million participants annually, for the period 2003-2017. We document that matching schedules, when they are offered, have become more generous over time. However, the proportion of firms offering a match fell sharply during the Great Recession and the proportion offering one did not recover to its pre-financial crisis level for almost a decade. Vesting schedules for DC plans have remained essentially unchanged since 2003, while the proportion of plans with auto-enrollment has increased dramatically over the same period. We find that the vast majority of plans that offer auto-enrollment have a default rate that is substantially lower than the level that would fully exploit the match offered by the employers.