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We use data from the Understanding America Study (UAS) internet panel to build upon the Knoll and Houts Financial Knowledge Scale (FKS). Specifically, we provide practitioners with a shorter 10‐item scale, describe additional analyses on both the full‐ and short‐form versions of the scales, and explore the relationship between FKS scores and a variety of retirement‐related outcome variables. Importantly, the full‐ and short‐form scales are developed using a statistical model that accounts for guessing, which allows us to provide more accurate estimates of financial knowledge than similar scales that do not account for guessing. The paper also provides conversion tables that can aid in the analysis and interpretation of FKS scores in practice. With the development of a 10‐item short form that accounts for guessing, we hope to provide practitioners and researchers with a tool that will enable them to reliably measure financial knowledge more parsimoniously and accurately than other measures currently in use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Claiming Social Security retirement benefits before the full retirement age (FRA) results in permanently lower benefits. Therefore, delaying claiming is often considered the best decision economically. We examine a number of novel changes aimed at encouraging individuals to delay claiming in the months and years before reaching their FRA, such as changing the early retirement reductions, paying lump sums, rewarding work with bonuses, instituting a lottery, and reforming the earnings test. We use Modeling Income in the Near Term, Version 6 data to determine the socioeconomic characteristics of individuals who claim at various ages and analyze one of the incentives to encourage delayed claiming: changing the early retirement reductions. We model the incentive first with no assumed behavioral response, and then we assume a 1-year delay in benefit claiming. We find that the delay in claiming would result in larger increases to both monthly and lifetime benefits than would the incentive alone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The majority of research on the retirement decision has focused on the health and wealth aspects of retirement. Such research concludes that people in better health and those enjoying a higher socioeconomic status tend to work longer than their less healthy and less wealthy counterparts. While financial and health concerns are a major part of the retirement decision, there are other issues that may affect the decision to retire that are unrelated to an individual's financial and health status. Judgment and decision-making and behavioral-economics research suggests that there may be a number of behavioral factors influencing the retirement decision. The author reviews and highlights such factors and offers a unique perspective on potential determinants of retirement behavior, including anchoring and framing effects, affective forecasting, hyperbolic discounting, and the planning fallacy. The author then describes findings from previous research and draws novel connections between existing decision-making research and the retirement decision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditional economic theory posits that people make decisions by maximizing a utility function in which all of the relevant constraints and preferences are included and weighed appropriately. Behavioral economists and decision-making researchers, however, are interested in how people make decisions in the face of incomplete information, limited cognitive resources, and decision biases. Empirical findings in the areas of behavioral economics and judgment and decision making (JDM) demonstrate departures from the notion that man is economically rational, illustrating instead that people often act in ways that are economically suboptimal. This article outlines findings from the JDM and behavioral-economics literatures that highlight the many behavioral impediments to saving that individuals may encounter on their way to financial security. I discuss how behavioral and psychological issues, such as self-control, emotions, and choice architecture can help policymakers understand what factors, aside from purely economic ones, may affect individuals' savings behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]