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Alternative measures of non-cognitive skills and their effect on retirement preparation and financial capability

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2019

Gema Zamarro
Gema Zamarro*
Affiliation:
University of Arkansas & University of Southern California, Fayetteville, USA
*
*Corresponding author. Email: gzamarro@uark.edu
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Abstract

Individuals are increasingly asked to take responsibility for preparing for retirement and available financial products to do so are growing in sophistication. A better understanding of how non-cognitive skills influence financial capability and retirement preparation could help effective policy design. This area of research has been hampered by the struggle to find reliable measures of these skills. I argue that questionnaires themselves can be seen as performance tasks, such that measures of survey effort could lead to meaningful measures of non-cognitive skills. I exploit the fact that I observe respondents taking multiple survey modules covering different topics in different moments of time to build survey effort measures in a nationally representative internet panel. I use survey effort measures along with self-reports to study the role of non-cognitive skills on retirement preparation and financial capability. My results show that non-cognitive skills can have a significant role, beyond the role of cognitive ability.

Keywords

Financial capabilitynon-cognitive skillsretirement preparationC83C91D14
Type
Article
Information
Journal of Pension Economics & Finance , Volume 20 , Special Issue 4: New Longitudinal Data for Retirement Analysis and Policy , October 2021 , pp. 532 - 546
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019

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