Do Saving Incentives Work?

Rethinking Saving Incentives

Tax Incentives for Household Saving and Borrowing

The paper reviews the literature on these tax incentives, with special focus on long-term saving, housing, and household liabilities. The paper addresses several areas of policy intervention: (1) the interest rate effect on personal saving; (2) the effect of tax incentives on long-term mandatory saving programs; (3) government programs that target saving for home purchase; (4) government progra...

How Do Emotions Influence Saving

Employers have moved away from traditional defined benefit pension plans to defined contribution plans such as 401(k)s. As a result, many individuals are now required to make their own retirement saving and investment decisions, which has raised concerns about their ability and desire to handle these decisions. Since investment choices have major implications for future financial welfare, it is...

Do Organizational Incentives Spur Innovation?

To date, we have only partially begun to develop an understanding of the channels through which innovation is facilitated within organizations. Although talented individuals are pivotal to supporting knowledge accumulation and renewal, they may be more willing to contribute new ideas if they expect to reap some of the gains that these ideas generate for the firm. In considering this perspective...

Do Incentives Destroy Voluntary Cooperation?

We investigate experimentally how explicit performance incentives in incomplete employment contracts interact with agents’ voluntary cooperation in one-shot and repeated gift-exchange experiments. If contracts are incentive compatible, agents choose their bestreply effort and there is no voluntary cooperation. By contrast, there is substantial voluntary cooperation if the contract is not incent...