This study gauges Finnish people’s knowledge about pensions and their trust in the pension system. A further aim is to see if knowledge and trust are related and to explore the role of sociodemographic factors in that relationship. We examine both self-assessed and objective knowledge of pension system details and look at how age, gender, education, income, and socioeconomic status are reflected in pension knowledge and trust. The results reveal that the relationship between pension knowledge and trust is driven by sociodemographic factors. However, for those with a primary education, there is a positive association between pension knowledge and trust.

Pension systems increasingly require active involvement from their participants for retirement planning. This leads to the need for a proper level of financial literacy to foster decision-making. Based on the Chilean Social Protection Survey and the Regional Development Index data, specific characteristics related to the region of residence, such as the quality of life, access to job opportunities, and available connectivity tools, are seen to have a positive impact on pension knowledge. Hence, these regional level results provide inputs to policymakers for developing appropriate policies regarding pension knowledge.

Many recent pension reforms require individuals to make more decisions on supplementary savings, investment choices, etc. Governments and the pension industry try to assist individuals through pension communication but little is known about the effectiveness of such policies. This paper uses Dutch longitudinal data to analyse the causal links between communication, pension knowledge, and conscious pension decision-making. A robust finding is that pension knowledge has a positive causal effect on active pension decision-making. Providing an annual pension statement might have a small positive effect on pension knowledge, but this result is sensitive to the identifying assumptions.

We study the combined effects of financial incentives and information provision on retirement behavior. To elicit preferences for retirement timing in the laboratory, we ask subjects to make retirement choices under different payoff schemes that introduce variation in financial incentives. Testing ceteris paribus conditions of the financial incentive alone shows a considerable delay of retirement once early retirement becomes financially less attractive. However, varying available information as another treatment parameter reveals considerable heterogeneity in the functioning of these incentives. Subjects who are explicitly informed about the expected pension wealth respond more strongly to financial incentives compared with those who only know their pension annuity. Being informed about a forward-looking measure of pension benefits makes the financial consequences of retirement choices more salient to the decision maker.