How Information Shapes Retirement Saving: Experimental Evidence from China’s Private Pension Account

15:40-17:00, Thursday, April 23, 2026

I-206, Boxue Building

Dr. Hanlin LOU currently works as a Research Fellow at the School of Economics at UNSW Sydney. He obtained his doctoral degree in Economics in 2022 from the University of Technology Sydney. His main research interests are in behavioural economics, experimental finance, and retirement finance. He has published his research in the Journal of Banking and Finance, the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, and the Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics.

Standard life-cycle models assume that individuals possess sufficient information to assess the long-term financial consequences of retirement saving. In practice, however, information frictions may hinder pension participation and voluntary contributions. This paper studies how different types of financial consequence information affect individuals' interest in a new defined contribution pension product in China, the Private Pension Account (PPA). We conducted an online experimental survey in August 2025 with a sample of 1,540 individuals aged 25 to 45 who were enrolled in the Basic Pension Insurance and earned at least RMB 120,000 per year. Participants were randomly assigned to a control group or to one of four information treatments providing personalized information on tax incentives, projected investment returns, aggregate retirement benefits, or a comparison between retirement saving and mortgage prepayment. We compare individuals' stated interest in the PPA across groups. We find that information interventions highlighting long-term financial consequences significantly increase interest in the PPA. Treatments presenting return projections, aggregate benefit information, or mortgage-related comparisons raise the likelihood of strong interest, while information on tax incentives alone has a limited average effect, but matters for specific subgroups with higher tax exposure. We document substantial heterogeneity in treatment effects by financial literacy, age, residential location, and prior engagement with the PPA. Our findings contribute to the behavioral and public economics literature by providing early experimental evidence from an emerging defined contribution pension system and offer insights into how personalized information and financial literacy interact to shape retirement saving decisions.

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