Promoting public retirement savings accounts during tax filing: evidence from field experiments

Abstract In 2015, the U.S. Treasury Department launched my RA, a no-fee retirement account designed for people who lacked employer-sponsored retirement options. We report findings from two behavioral field experiments intended to motivate interest in using the tax refund to open and fund my RAs directly through the tax-filing process. These experiments, administered to more than 100,000 low-income tax filers in 2016, embedded persuasive messages in emails sent to filers and directly within online tax-filing software. We find that interest in my RA was generally very low, although interest and enrollment intentions varied depending on the framing of the program's benefits.