6/18/2013 – How to teach Americans to save? Treat them like children (CNN Money)

Here’s something that recently surprised me: My six-year-old daughter is a pretty good saver.

A paper out this week from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) suggests that I shouldn’t have been so surprised. The conclusion: The best way to get people to save is to treat them like children. The paper is called Do Lottery Payments Induce Savings Behavior? and is written by a bunch of economics professors, including three from the University of Maryland, one from Northwestern, and another from Maastricht in the Netherlands. And it’s important, because, as you may have heard, we Americans are pretty bad savers. So people have been looking for ways to tackle this.

Read the full article at CNN Money.