TY  - JOUR
AU  - Beshears, John
AU  - Choi, James J
AU  - Hurwitz, Joshua
AU  - Laibson, David
AU  - Madrian, Brigitte C
TI  - Liquidity in Retirement Savings Systems: An International Comparison
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 21168
PY  - 2015
Y2  - May 2015
DO  - 10.3386/w21168
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w21168
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w21168.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
John Beshears
Harvard Business School
Baker Library 439
Soldiers Field
Boston, MA 02163
E-Mail: jbeshears@hbs.edu

James J. Choi
Yale School of Management
165 Whitney Avenue
P.O. Box 208200
New Haven, CT 06520-8200
E-Mail: james.choi@yale.edu

Joshua Hurwitz
National Bureau of Economic Research
1050 Massachusetts Ave
Cambridge, MA 02138
E-Mail: josh.hurwitz23@gmail.com

David Laibson
Department of Economics
Littauer M-12
Harvard University
Cambridge, MA 02138
Tel: 617/496-3402
Fax: 617/495-8570
E-Mail: dlaibson@gmail.com

Brigitte C. Madrian
730 B N. Eldon Tanner Building
Brigham Young University
Provo, UT 84602-3113
Tel: 801-422-4248
E-Mail: brigitte_madrian@byu.edu
M1  - published as John Beshears, James J. Choi, Joshua Hurwitz, David Laibson, Brigitte C. Madrian. "Liquidity in Retirement Savings Systems: An International Comparison," in David A. Wise, editor, "Insights in the Economics of Aging" University of Chicago Press (2017)

AB  - What is the socially optimal level of liquidity in a retirement savings system? Liquid retirement savings are desirable because liquidity enables agents to flexibly respond to pre-retirement events that raise the marginal utility of consumption. On the other hand, pre-retirement liquidity is undesirable when it leads to under-saving arising from, for example, planning mistakes or self-control problems. This paper compares the liquidity that six developed economies have built into their employer-based defined contribution (DC) retirement savings systems. We find that all of them, with the sole exception of the United States, have made their DC systems overwhelmingly illiquid before age 55.
ER  -