Reconsidering the role of choice and chance for predicting retirement wealth

Why do many households accumulate substantial wealth by retirement, while many other households accumulate very little? Venti and Wise (1999, 2001) directly examine this question by utilizing data that were superior to that available to previous researchers and conclude that “the bulk of the dispersion must be attributed to differences in the amount that households choose to save.” In this paper, we examine the extent that a remaining problem in their data affected their results: Their measure of lifetime earnings that was used to capture a household’s ability to save, despite being based on administrative data, was subject to topcoding in each year. Using a data set that was not subject to the same problem, we find that the ability to save (measured by lifetime earnings) played a much larger role. Our findings suggest that the correlation between lifetime earnings and savings was about 50 percent greater than what is found when using censored data.