{"doi":"10.3386/w31601","title":"Automatic Enrollment with a 12% Default Contribution Rate","abstract":"We study a retirement savings plan with a default contribution rate of 12% of income, which is much higher than previously studied defaults. Twenty-five percent of employees had not opted out of this default 12 months after hire; a literature review finds that the corresponding fraction in plans with lower defaults is approximately one-half. Because only contributions above 12% were matched by the employer, 12% was likely to be a suboptimal contribution rate for employees. Employees who remained at the 12% default contribution rate had average income that was approximately one-third lower than would be predicted from the relationship between salaries and contribution rates among employees who were not at 12%. Defaults may influence low-income employees more strongly in part because these employees face higher psychological barriers to active decision making.","journal":"National Bureau of Economic Research","year":2023,"id":391472,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":7,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9459,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2023-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":1145850,"name":"Ruofei Guo","orcid":null,"position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":62530,"name":"David Laibson","orcid":null,"position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":347913,"name":"Brigitte C. Madrian","orcid":"0000-0002-4820-4462","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":278783,"name":"James J. Choi","orcid":"0000-0003-3517-6885","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":247920,"name":"John Beshears","orcid":"0000-0002-3808-6423","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":24,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T01:18:47.408273Z","pmid":null,"pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}