Paternalism and pseudo-rationality: An illustration based on retirement savings

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Fadlon, Itzik; Laibson, David
• 署名单位: University of California System; University of California San Diego; National Bureau of Economic Research; Harvard University; Harvard University
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0047-2727
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jpubeco.2022.104763
• 发表日期: 2022
• 关键词: Paternalism; consumption; savings; Social planner; optimization; myopia; Passivity

摘要

Resource allocations are jointly determined by the actions of social planners and households. We study economies in which households have private information about their tastes and have a distribution of behavioral propensities: optimal, myopic, or passive. In such economies, we show that utilitarian plan-ners enact policies such as Social Security and default savings that cause equilibrium consumption smoothing (on average in the cross-section of households). Our framework resolves tensions in the household savings literature by simultaneously explaining evidence of consumption smoothing and opti-mal savings on average across households while also predicting behavioral anomalies at the household level. In general, common tests of consumption smoothing are not sufficient to show that households are optimizers, but observational data or natural experiments can be used to identify the fractions of opti-mizing, myopic, and passive households.(c) 2022 Published by Elsevier B.V.