Responding to the Downturn: How Does Information Change Behavior?

Many workers nearing retirement experienced a dramatic decrease in their retirement assets due to the stock market downturn. In order to maintain their expected standard of living in retirement, workers will need to work longer, save more, or do both. To measure the response of older workers to this downturn, the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College (CRR) fielded the CRR 2009 Retirement Survey on a nationally representative sample of 45-59-year-old labor force participants with relatively high pre-downturn assets.

This brief is the third of four based on the CRR 2009 Retirement Survey. The first brief described the Survey and highlighted its unique financial, employment, and behavioral factors.2 The second brief explored the relationship between these factors and worker responses to the downturn.3 This brief examines how providing simple information about the trade-offs involved in responding to the downturn impacts the responses.