On track for retirement? The impact of providing a calculator on employee retirement contributions Matthew Olckers Abstract
Over sixty percent of employees at a large South African financial services company select the minimum rate of 7.5 percent for their monthly retirement contributions—far below the recommended rate of 15 percent. I use a field experiment to investigate whether giving employees a retirement calculator, which provides projections of retirement income, leads to increases in contributions. The average treatment effect is positive but very small and not statistically different from zero. The treatment effect does not differ by gender but does increase with age.