The DOI matches its Crossref record.
Do 401(k) contributions crowd out other personal saving?
Open accessAbstract
During the late 1980s, contributions to 401(k) plans eclipsed contributions to Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs) as the leading form of tax-deferred individual retirement saving in the United States. In this paper we describe patterns of participation in 401(k) plans, contrast these patterns with IRA participation, and evaluate the net impact of 401(k) contributions on personal saving. We find that 401(k) participation conditional on eligibility exceeds 60% at all income levels. In contrast, IRA participation at the height of that program rose sharply with income. We use two methods to evaluate the net saving effect of 401(k) contributions on personal saving: we compare the financial assets of families who are eligible for 401(k) saving with the assets of those who are not eligible, and we consider the change over time in the assets of like groups of savers. We find little evidence that 401(k) contributions substitute for other forms of personal saving, including IRA contributions.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cited by
Identification and Inference in Nonlinear Difference-in-Differences Models
Athey, S., & Imbens, G. W. (2006) · Econometrica · doi:10.1111/j.1468-0262.2006.00668.x · Cited by 1,084
Chen, M. K. (2013) · American Economic Review · doi:10.1257/aer.103.2.690 · Cited by 745
Double/debiased machine learning for treatment and structural parameters
Newey, W. K., Hansen, C., Duflo, E., Robins, J., Chernozhukov, V., Demirer, M., & Chetverikov, D. (2017) · doi:10.1920/wp.cem.2017.2817 · Cited by 486
Program evaluation and causal inference with high-dimensional data
Belloni, A., Chernozhukov, V., Fern�ndez-Val, I., & Hansen, C. (2017) · Econometrica · doi:10.3982/ecta12723 · Cited by 317
Doubly robust uniform confidence band for the conditional average treatment effect function
Lee, S., Okui, R., & Whang, Y. (2017) · Journal of Applied Econometrics · doi:10.1002/jae.2574 · Cited by 67
Metadata
- Authors
- Poterba, J. M., Venti, S. F., & Wise, D. A.
- Venue
- Journal of Public Economics
- Publisher
- Elsevier BV
- Published
- 1995-09
- Volume
- 58
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 1-32
- ISSN
- 0047-2727 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W3123785084
- Cited by
- 277
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 43.65
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Do 401(k) contributions crowd out other personal saving? https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1016/0047-2727(94)01462-w
- The paper
- Poterba, J. M., Venti, S. F., & Wise, D. A. (1995). Do 401(k) contributions crowd out other personal saving? Journal of Public Economics. https://doi.org/10.1016/0047-2727(94)01462-w
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
