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Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2011 with Funding from Evidence from a Randomized Experiment
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Duflo, Esther Sáez, E. V. Rodrigo Banerjee, Abhijit Vinayak |
| Copyright Year | 2011 |
| Abstract | This paper analyzes a randomized experiment to shed light on the role of information and social interactions in employees' decisions to enroll in a Tax Deferred Account (TDA) retirement plan within a large university. The experiment encouraged a random sample of employees in a subset of departments to attend a benefits information fair organized by the university, by promising a monetary reward for attendance. The experiment more than tripled the attendance rate of these treated individuals (relative to controls), and doubled that of untreated individuals within departments where some individuals were treated. TDA enrollment 5 and 1 1 months after the fair was significantly higher in departments where some individuals were treated than in departments where nobody was treated. However, the effect on TDA enrollment is almost as large for individuals in treated departments who did not receive the encouragement as for those who did. We provide three interpretations, differential treatment effects, social network effects, and motivational reward effects, to account for these results. (JEL D83, 122) 'We thank Daron Acemoglu, Orley Ashenfelter, Josh Angrist, David Autor, Abhijit Banerjee, David Card, Jonathan Gruber, Guido Imbens, Larry Katz, Jeffrey Kling, Botond Koszegi, Michael Kremer, Alan Krueger, David Laibson, Sendhil Mullainathan, and seminar participants at Berkeley, MIT, Princeton, and UCLA for very helpful comments and discussions. We gratefully acknowledge financial support from the National Science Foundation (SES-0078535). We are especially grateful to all the members of the Benefits Office of the University for their help and support in organizing the experiment. This paper does not reflect the views of the university or its benefits office. |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/64011/roleofinformatio00dufl.pdf?sequence=1 |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
