My own paper presentation at NTA

In addition to commenting on the Green-Phillips paper noted in the preceding blog entry, I also presented one of my recent papers, forthcoming in the Connecticut Law Review, entitled "Multiple Myopias, Multiple Selves, and the Under-Saving Problem."  Jason Seligman of Ohio State offered thoughtful and helpful comments.  This was my first, and perhaps last, presentation of this paper, which I finished early last summer, as consumer demand has generally been higher for my Piketty paper (as well as for a short piece on corporate tax reform that I will post on SSRN after it appears in Tax Notes next month).

A link of the slides for my talk is available here, and a link for the paper is available here.

Slide 5 contains a little table that ought to have been in my paper, and that will indeed be (with some expansion) in the final version.  Here is an initial expansion over what I had in the slide:

Table 1 - Summary of (Some) Possible Explanations for Low Retirement Saving

           

Cause for low                        Representative           Potential

retirement saving                 Figure                         Policy Response

Naïve myopia                          Grasshopper                Mandatory saving?

                                               

                                                                       

Sophisticated myopia              Odysseus (Sirens)       Opportunity to choose (and

                                                                                    lock in) saving pre-temptation?

Regret aversion re.                  Fantasy sports player   Good defaults, require active choice?

 "active" choice                      who won’t trade        
                                                           

                                                                                   

Procrastination                        Hamlet                        Good defaults, require active choice?

                                                                                                                             

Inattentiveness                        Voters                         Good defaults, require attention?

Multiple selves                        Sybil                            ???