Aaron Sojourner is an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota Carlson School of Management. He completed his PhD in economics at Northwestern University in 2009. He also has an MA in public policy analysis from the University of Chicago and a BA in history from Yale University. Research interests include the impacts of labor unions in the economic and political arenas, consumer financial decisions, and policies affecting human capital formation.
He serves on the steering committee member or the Human Capital Research Collaborative and a research affiliate at IZA. Complementing his research interest, Sojourner has a wide range of policy experience including past service as an adviser to the Office of the Illinois State Treasurer, member of several policy working groups, and as a fellow in the U.S. Senate’s Labor Policy Office.
Recent findings on limited financial literacy and exponential growth bias suggest saving decisions may not be optimal because such decisions require an accurate understanding of how current contributions can translate into income in retirement. This study uses a large-scale field experiment to measure how a low-cost, direct-mail intervention designed to inform subjects about this relationship affects their saving behavior. Using administrative data prior to and following the intervention, we measure its effect on participation and the level of contributions in retirement saving accounts. Those sent income projections along with enrollment information were more likely to change contribution levels and increase annual contributions relative to the control group. Among those who made a change in contribution, the increase in annual contributions was approximately $1,150. Results from a follow-up survey corroborate these findings and show heterogeneous effects of the intervention by rational and behavioral factors known to affect saving. Finally, we find evidence of behavioral influences on decision-making in that the assumptions used to generate the projections influence the saving response.
Eric Johnson is a faculty member at the Columbia Business School at Columbia University where he is the inaugural holder of the Norman Eig Chair of Business, and Director of the Center for Decision Sciences. His research examines the interface between Behavioral Decision Research, Economics and the decisions made by consumers, managers, and their implications for public policy, markets and marketing. Among other topics, Johnson has explored how the way options are presented to decision-makers affect their choices in areas such as organ donation, the choice of environmentally friendly products, and investments. According to the Institute for Scientific Information, he is one of the most highly cited scholars in Business and Economics.
Prof. Johnson’s research and comments have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Money, Discover, Business Week and The Financial Times, and on The CBS Evening News and National Public Radio. His publications have appeared in the Science, Psychological Review, Nature Neuroscience, Harvard Business Review, the Journal of Economic Theory, and many other consumer, economic, marketing and psychology journals. He has co-authored two books: Decision Research: A Field Guide, published by Sage Publications and The Adaptive Decision-Maker published by Cambridge University Press.
After graduation from Rutgers University, he received his M.S. and PhD. in Psychology from Carnegie-Mellon University, and was a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellow at Stanford. He previously has taught at Carnegie Mellon, was a visiting professor at the Sloan School at MIT, was the inaugural holder of the David W. Hauck Chair in Marketing, and a Professor of Operations and Information Management and Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, The National Institutes of Health, The Alfred P. Sloan and Russell Sage Foundations, and the Office of Naval Research.
He has been an Associate Editor of the Journal of Consumer Psychology and is a member of several editorial boards as well as the Senior Editor for Decision Sciences at Behavioral Science and Policy.
Older adults have lower levels of fluid intelligence than younger adults, but decision-making studies show a mixed picture of performance over the lifespan: older adults often do worse but some studies find no difference or even better performance. We propose that age differences in decision performance result from the interplay between two sets of capabilities, one which finds worse performance for older adults (e.g., fluid intelligence and executive functions) and one on which older adults are better (e.g., crystallized intelligence). Specifically, we hypothesized that higher levels of crystallized intelligence help offset lower levels of fluid intelligence for older adults. The performance of older adults relative to younger adults depends on the relative importance of each capability for the decision task. We tested this compensating capabilities hypothesis in a broad sample of younger and older adults, collecting a battery of standard cognitive measures and measures of economically important decision-making “traits”— including temporal discounting, loss aversion, financial literacy, and debt literacy. We found that older participants performed as well as or better than younger participants on these four decision-making measures. Structural equation modeling revealed that fluid intelligence, crystallized intelligence, and inhibitory control were significant partial mediators of decision-making age differences. Specifically, we found that older participants’ greater crystallized intelligence offset their lower levels of fluid intelligence for financial and debt literacy as well as temporal discounting, but not for loss aversion. These results have important implications for public policy and for the design of effective decision environments for older adults.
Cynthia Needles Fletcher is Professor in the Department of Human Development and Family Studies at Iowa State University with responsibilities for Extension, research, and teaching focused on family economic and social policy issues-ranging from financial capability to rural poverty. Fletcher develops and evaluates Iowa State Extension community-based financial education programs that target such diverse audiences as low-incomes families, women, secondary teachers, and investors at each life stage. Current research assesses barriers to family asset-building in rural Midwest communities, investment education innovations in underserved communities, and the effects of financial literacy on college students’ academic success. Fletcher received the American Council on Consumer Interests Distinguished Fellow Award in 2012.
Joanne Yoong is an economist at the RAND Corporation, where her research is focused on individual decisionmaking with an emphasis on finance, health, and economic development; she is also a professor at the Pardee RAND Graduate School. Her previous research in applied microeconomics was largely based in India and included studies of the impact of hospital financing on doctors’ delivery of child-health services (in Madhya Pradesh) and the design of microcredit loan contracts to support better long-term investments in health (in Orissa State, joint with Aprajit Mahajan and Alessandro Tarozzi). She was also a credit derivatives research analyst in the Fixed Income, Commodities and Currencies Division of Goldman Sachs in New York and London. As an adjunct staff member at RAND in 2007, her work investigated the use of American Life Panel survey to address issues related to financial literacy and asset market participation in older adults. Yoong received her A.B. in economics and applied and computational mathematics from Princeton University, and her Ph.D. in economics from Stanford University, where she was an FSI Starr Foundation Fellow.
Nick Maynard is the Director of Innovation for Doorways to Dreams Fund (D2D) where he leads the Financial Entertainment (FE) innovation work. Nick holds both an MBA and an MPP from Harvard University; he also holds a BSE from Princeton University. D2D is a national nonprofit whose mission is to strengthen the financial opportunity and security of low to moderate income (“LMI”) consumers by innovating, incubating and stimulating new financial products and policies.
Annamaria Lusardi is the Denit Trust Distinguished Scholar in Economics and Accountancy at the George Washington University School of Business. Previously, she was the Joel Z. and Susan Hyatt Professor of Economics at Dartmouth College, where she taught for twenty years. She has also taught at Princeton University, the University of Chicago Public Policy School, the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, and Columbia Business School. In 2008 she was a visiting scholar at Harvard Business School. Moreover, she is the Academic Director of the Global Center for Financial Literacy, and the Director of the Financial Literacy Center, a joint Center with the Rand Corporation and the Wharton School created with the support of the Social Security Administration. Dr Lusardi won numerous research awards. Among them is a research fellowship from the Irving B. Harris Graduate School of Public Policy Studies at the University of Chicago, a faculty fellowship from the John M. Olin Foundation, and a junior and senior faculty fellowship from Dartmouth College. She is the recipient of the Fidelity Pyramid Prize, a $50,000 award to authors of published applied research that best helps address the goal of improving lifelong financial well-being for Americans.
In an increasingly risky and globalized marketplace, people must be able to make well-informed financial decisions. New international research demonstrates that financial illiteracy is widespread in both well-developed and rapidly changing markets. Women are less financially literate than men, the young and the old are less financially literate than the middle-aged, and more educated people are more financially knowledgeable. Most importantly, the financially literate are more likely to plan for retirement. Instrumental variables estimates show that the effects of financial literacy on retirement planning tend to be underestimated. In sum, around the world, financial literacy is critical to retirement security
Emilia Bonaccorsi di Patti, World Bank
Robin Lumsdaine, American University
Joanne W. Hsu is an economist at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. Her research focuses on household financial decision making, including the role of financial sophistication and cognition. At the Board, she is part of the team responsible for administering and disseminating the Survey of Consumer Finances. Prior to joining the Board in August 2011, she completed her PhD in economics at the University of Michigan and was a Networks Financial Institute Dissertation Fellow in Financial Literacy. She is a member of the research team of the Cognitive Economics Project, a multidisciplinary study of older Americans that investigates how cognitive and subjective factors relate to decisions preparing for and sustaining well-being in retirement.
Women tend to be less financially literate than men, which is consistent with a division of labor in which husbands manage finances. However, women also tend to outlive their husbands. I find that older women acquire financial literacy as they approach widowhood — 80% would catch up with their husbands by the expected onset of widowhood, and these gains are not attributable to cognitive decline among men. The results are consistent with a model in which the division of labor collapses when a spouse dies: women have incentives to delay acquiring financial human capital, but also to begin learning before widowhood.
Peter Tufano is the Peter Moores Dean and Professor of Finance at Saïd Business School. Since joining Oxford in July 2011, Tufano has led the development of the new Oxford 1+1 MBA Programme, a two year customized management education that combines an MBA with one of Oxford’s many specialized Masters programmes. Tufano’s research has focused on innovation, most recently how innovations in consumer finance can improve the delivery of services to low income families. He has developed courses on consumer finance, founded a non-profit R&D lab for new financial product development (www.d2dfund.org), and served on advisory groups in the US (and now the UK) addressing the issue of financial inclusion. Before joining Oxford, Tufano spent 33 years at Harvard, most recently serving as Professor and Senior Associate Dean at Harvard Business School, as well as the co-Founder of the Harvard University Innovation Lab (i-Lab).
George Washington University School of Business
Duquès Hall, Room 651
George Washington University School of Business
Duquès Hall, Room 651
George Washington University School of Business
Duquès Hall, Room 651
George Washington University School of Business
Funger Hall, Room 108
George Washington University School of Business
Duquès Hall, Room 651
George Washington University School of Business
Duquès Hall, Room 651