Through our Center for Financial and Economic Decisionmaking (CFED), RAND researchers study how individuals and families make financial decisions and examine how public policy can be leveraged to help improve financial stability.
The decrease in defined benefit pension plans use, coupled with an increase in the life span, is shaping how individuals plan financially for their retirement. CFED researchers investigate how households save for retirement, invest their savings, and spend down their assets in retirement.
CFED researchers design, implement, and evaluate interventions targeted at helping individuals build savings, improve credit, reduce debt, and strengthen financial literacy and capability.
The RAND Behavioral Finance Forum is an annual conference and webinar series for federal government, academic, and industry leaders on behavioral finance topics such as retirement security, consumer financial protection, and financial advice.
This dissertation explores the college major decision-making process, both for initial and subsequent major choices, and analyzes the associations between major choice behaviors and student outcomes such as time to degree and probability of graduation.
Examines if state-mandated financial education improves debt-related and college-going behaviors among economically vulnerable young adults.
Most U.S. seniors follow nonstandard retirement pathways. Seniors with better cognitive ability were more likely to follow nonstandard retirement pathways: In a studied sample, 59.1 percent of those with high cognitive ability had a job after age 65.
Explores gaps in financial knowledge and the overall state of financial literacy of college students.
This report — part of a series examining critical security challenges in 2040 — uses survey data from a nationally representative sample of adults to examine perceptions of economic and national security and compare attitudes and opinions of millennials with those of previous generations. It concludes by making inferences about potential millennial concerns about security in the year 2040.
This paper explores the utility of two prominent psychological variables - cognitive ability and personality - as predictors, while also substantially expanding the detail with which retirement pathways can be characterized.
Our results suggest that educational programs that engage the user emotionally or physically and involve vicarious experience rather than text-based or passive educational programs are key for making gains in both financial literacy and confidence in financial knowledge.
The results of this paper show a strong empirical relevance of subjective survival curves, indicating the importance to take into consideration of this dimension of individual heterogeneity in life cycle models.
Bolsa Familia (BF) is a conditional cash transfer programme in Brazil. This report aims to understand the principal agent problem in BF. Our findings suggest that implementation agencies must have a clear incentive in the programme either through the provision of support to them in the programme or through being held to account. We show that more integration between BF and supporting services is associated with better implementation.
Explores the participation and distribution decisions of those who separate from their employers.
To help school district leaders and teachers make informed decisions about the adoption and use of appropriate K–12 financial education curricula, RAND researchers document the current state of the literature and advance a set of criteria for assessing the content, utility, quality, and efficacy of the curricula.
To help educators think about which curriculum to use, and to better understand the strengths and gaps in the curriculum currently being used, the RAND Corporation developed this tool for reviewing financial education curricula.
