Wealth Inequality and Incentives to Save
Faculty Supervisor:
Project and Position Description:
In this project, Professor Cormac O’Dea (Yale) (along with coauthors at MIT, Taha Choukhmane & Lawrence Schmidt) will study the U.S. Defined Contribution (DC) retirement system. The authors have put together an extensive data set on the largest 5,000 US DC plans over the years 2003-2018 and merged in tax records to create a new employee-employer linked data set. A feature of the US retirement saving landscape are substantial incentives to save – the more an employee saves, the more their employer often contributes to their retirement account.
The projects will include:
i) A study of who benefits from the hundreds of billions of dollars annually dedicated to encouraging retirement saving in the US.
ii) A study of how individuals respond to retirement saving incentives. Do they increase their saving in retirement accounts at the expense of their saving in other accounts? Do they increase their total saving? How do these responses differ by individual characteristics?
iii) A study of how having more wealth in one’s retirement account, as a result of generous employer contributions, impacts the outcomes of one’s children.
Requisite Skills and Qualifications:
Specific duties for the project:
• Collect, clean, link, and maintain economic datasets. Prepare detailed documentation.
• Develop economics and statistical models and implement program codes in common statistical and mathematical programming languages (e.g., Stata, Python, MATLAB, R).
• Perform data analyses, including regression analysis
Special Application Instructions:
Some data access will only be permissible for i) US citizens and ii) those who have spent 3 out of the last 5 years in the US. Priority may be given to such applicants.