Racial, Ethnic and Gender Retirement Knowledge Gaps in the United States
37 Pages Posted: 27 Dec 2022
Date Written: December 16, 2022
Abstract
The Retirement Knowledge Scale (RKS) assesses three dimensions of financial planning for retirement: reflection about retirement plans, engagement with information on retirement preparedness, and evaluation of retirement preparedness. We provide preliminary evidence about the reliability and validity of the RKS and compare retirement knowledge by race, ethnicity and gender in a sample of 1351 adults participating in the 2020 Health and Retirement Study experimental module. Men score more favorably than women on the RKS by 0.23 of a standard deviation. We also find that Whites report greater RKS than Blacks and Hispanics of 0.35 and 0.64 of a standard deviation, respectively. When looking at the intersection of race, ethnicity and gender, while White women score higher than Black and Hispanic women by 0.27 and 0.47 of standard deviation, White men score higher than Black and Hispanic men in the RKS by 0.54 and 0.87 of a standard deviation.
Keywords: racial disparities, gender disparities, retirement preparedness, financial knowledge
JEL Classification: G53, J26, J16, Z13
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation