Which Early Withdrawal Penalty Attracts the Most Deposits to a Commitment Savings Account?

Determinants of early-access to retirement savings: Lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic

Australian regulations strictly limit early withdrawals from retirement plan accounts. However, in 2020, the Government made otherwise illiquid plan balances temporarily liquid, offering emergency relief during the pandemic. The COVID-19 Early Release Scheme allowed participants in financial hardship easy access to up to $A20,000 of savings over two rounds. We use administrative and survey data from a large retirement plan to describe how and why participants withdrew savings under the scheme. A majority report that they needed the money immediately but around one quarter said they anticipated future needs. Most thought about the decision for less than a week, acted soon after each round opened, and withdrew as much as they could. Many people did not estimate, or appear to have mis-estimated, the impact the withdrawal could have on their retirement savings. Our findings offer insights into preferences for liquidity. They also raise questions about whether the features of the early release scheme, and their implied endorsement by the Government, influenced some withdrawers more than personal deliberations over financial welfare.

COVID-19 and attitudes towards early withdrawal of pension funds: The role of trust and political ideology

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Chilean Congress approved three laws between July 2020 and April 2021 that allowed early withdrawals of pension funds without any eligibility constraints. In this paper, we use nationwide survey data to examine the factors associated with people's assessments about the suitability of these policies in the context of the pandemic, with a particular focus on trust and political ideology. We find that respondents that declare high levels of trust in Chile's pension system, financial system, and political institutions and actors tend to oppose early withdrawal policies. Similarly, respondents on the right of the political spectrum and those that voted for the incumbent president, who opposed this policy, also declare opposition to early withdrawals. Overall, our findings suggest that political attitudes and beliefs are associated with policy views on changes to Chile's pension-fund system and that support for early withdrawal policies may be driven by lack of confidence in institutions.

Nudging: Progress to date and future directions

Nudges influence behavior by changing the environment in which decisions are made, without restricting the menu of options and without altering financial incentives. This paper assesses past empirical research on nudging and provides recommendations for future work in this area by discussing examples of successful and unsuccessful nudges and by analyzing 174 articles that estimate nudge treatment effects. Researchers in disciplines spanning the behavioral sciences, using varied data sources, have documented that many different types of nudges succeed in changing behavior in a wide range of domains. Nudges that automate some aspect of the decision-making process have an average effect size, measured by Cohen's d, that is 0.193 larger than that of other nudges. Our analyses point to the need for future research to pay greater attention to (1) determining which types of nudges tend to be most impactful; (2) using field and laboratory research approaches as complementary methods; (3) measuring long-run effects of nudges; (4) considering effects of nudges on non-targeted outcomes; and (5) examining interaction effects among nudges and other interventions.

Measuring Time Preferences

We review research that measures time preferences-i.e., preferences over intertemporal tradeoffs. We distinguish between studies using financial flows, which we call "money earlier or later" (MEL) decisions and studies that use time-dated consumption/effort. Under different structural models, we show how to translate what MEL experiments directly measure (required rates of return for financial flows) into a discount function over utils. We summarize empirical regularities found in MEL studies and the predictive power of those studies. We explain why MEL choices are driven in part by some factors that are distinct from underlying time preferences.