Professor, Student Assistant Honored For Study of Retirement Savings

Yesterday, TIAA-CREF, one of the world's largest pension systems, announced that Assistant Professor of Political Economy David I. Laibson '88 and Jeremy B. Tobacman '99 had won a Certificate of Excellence for their paper titled "Self Control and Saving for Retirement."

Along with their collaborator, Andrea Repetto, an economics professor at the University of Chile, Laibson and Tobacman will each receive $1,000 in prize money for their entry.

"It's a behavioral analysis of life-cycle consumption savings decisions," Tobacman said.

The collaboration between Tobacman and Laibson began last summer, when Tobacman worked as Laibson's research assistant.

Laibson then offered Tobacman the position of co-author last fall.

"He invited me to become a co-author on a project that culminated in this paper," Tobacman said.

"He described the direction that he saw for the project, and the commitment that it would entail for me," he said.

Their work first appeared in the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, a semi-annual publication.

Two other essays were honored by the TIAA-CREF with certificates, while a book by Dora L. Costa, an associate professor of economics at MIT, won the grand prize, the Samuelson Award for Outstanding Scholarly Writing on Life-time Financial Security.

The Samuelson award is named after Dr. Paul A. Samuelson, the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Economics.

Harvard Professor of Economics Claudia D. Goldin '88 said, "Costa has produced the definitive work on why and how we retired and learned to enjoy our older years."

TIAA-CREF, in its 80th year, is a retirement system for two million employees at 8,000 colleges, universities, museums, libraries and related nonprofit institutions.

The recently established TIAA-CREF Institute oversees competition for the awards.

The award program's aims include strengthening the TIAA-CREF's role as a leader in the area of "lifetime financial security for individuals and their families," according to an agency press release.