Labor Studies.

• Position: National Bureau of Economic Research's program

The NBER's Program on Labor Studies met in Cambridge on November 7. Program Director Richard B. Freeman and Research Associate Lawrence F. Katz, both of Harvard University, organized the meeting. The following papers were discussed:

Sewin Chan, New York University, and Ann Huff Stevens, NBER and University of California, Davis, "What You Don't Know Can't Help You: Knowledge and Retirement Decisionmaking"

Steven J. Hairier, Michigan State University, and Melvin Stephens Jr., NBER and Carnegie Mellon University, "Is There a Retirement-Consumption Puzzle? Evidence Using Subjective Retirement Expectations"

Gordon Dahl, NBER and University of Rochester, and Enrico Moretti, NBER and University of California, Los Angeles, "The Demand for Sons: Evidence from Divorce, Fertility, and Unwed Mothers in the U.S. and Around the World"

Jennifer Hunt, NBER and University of Montreal, "Trust and Bribery: The Role of Quid Pro Quo and the Link with Crime"

Justin McCrary, University of Michigan, "The Effect of Court-Ordered Hiring Quotas on the Composition and Quality of Police"

Chan and Stevens focus on this puzzle: how can individuals respond to detailed pension information that, apparently, they do not possess? Recent evidence shows that most individuals do not know the details of their employer-provided pension plans. At the same time, virtually all recent studies of retirement timing are based on administrative data of which individuals themselves may not be aware. Chart and Stevens use individuals' self-reports to construct measures of knowledge about pension plans. They show that individual responsiveness to pension incentives based on employer-reported data vary dramatically with these knowledge measures. Well-informed individuals have an elasticity of retirement with respect to pension incentives that is three times as large as the average response (which ignores information issues.) In contrast, there is no evidence of a relationship between their pensions and retirement timing among the uninformed. This should encourage researchers to make more use of self-reported data in order to better understand decisionmaking.

Previous research shows a systematic fall in consumption at retirement, a finding that is inconsistent with the life-cycle/permanent income hypothesis. In their paper, Haider and Stephens use workers' beliefs about their expected retirement dates as an instrument for retirement. After demonstrating that subjective retirement expectations...