New thesis: Individual and household financial retirement decisions

On Tuesday September 26, 2023, Andre Lot will hold a trial lecture on a prescribed topic and defend his thesis for the PhD degree at NHH.

Andre Lot's thesis studies individual and household financial retirement decisions, using experiments and national panel survey data.

Financial retirement decisions are different from other investment and consumption decisions people usually make. A person only lives and retires once, so there is a limited opportunity to learn from one's past bad outcomes. Individuals must consider their mortality when making long-term financial plans. National laws and regulations also constrain which financial retirement decisions people can make in the field.

Markus Lithell defends his thesis September 20

On Wednesday September 20, 2023, Markus Lithell will hold a trial lecture on a prescribed topic and defend his thesis for the PhD degree at NHH.

In this context, in the first chapter of his thesis, he investigates why people, on average, believe they will live shorter than the demographic predictions, and how these biased longevity beliefs impact financial choices for retirement. He finds that individuals have wrong assumptions about how long an average person lives, and that this drives a person to be pessimistic about their longevity. He also documents that someone who is pessimistic about their longevity takes less financial risk, in a simulated financial planning task, where the actual risks come not from human biology, but strictly from computer-generated random draws.

Then, in the second chapter (published in the Journal of Banking and Finance) with co-authors Xiaogeng Xu, Kremena Bachmann, and Thorsten Hens, Andre Lot replicates most findings from earlier experimental studies on retirement decision-making. They adopt updated experiment designs using larger online samples that represent more broadly the general population.

Finally, in the third chapter, with co-authors Francisco Santos and Kremena Bachmann, he investigates what triggers households to open a tax-incentivized retirement savings account for the first time. They find that many socio-demographic factors that determine who uses and owns such accounts, in general, do not explain household decisions to open such an account for the first time.