About

James Choi is Professor of Finance at the Yale School of Management. His primary research areas include household finance and behavioral finance, with notable work on automatic enrollment that has influenced pension plan design globally. He has also conducted research on the effects of social identity and the application of psychology to increase preventive health behaviors. Professor Choi is a two-time recipient of the TIAA Paul A. Samuelson Award for outstanding scholarly writing on lifelong financial security. He serves as an Associate Editor at the Journal of Finance and is a TIAA Institute Fellow. His previous roles include Co-Director of the Retirement and Disability Research Center at the National Bureau of Economic Research and membership on the FINRA Investor Issues Committee and the American Finance Association’s Ethics Committee. He holds a Ph.D. in economics and an A.B. in applied mathematics from Harvard University.

Research topics

• Psychology
• Social psychology
• Medicine
• Computer Science
• Sociology
• Political Science
• Economics
• Social Science
• Microeconomics
• Law
• Monetary economics
• Demographic economics
• Medical emergency
• Internet privacy
• Family medicine
• Financial economics
• Business
• Nursing
• Virology
• Socioeconomics
• Actuarial science
• Finance

Selected publications

• Employer-based short-term savings accounts

  Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks · 2025-05-23

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• How Good is AI at Twisting Arms? Experiments in Debt Collection

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
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• How Good is AI at Twisting Arms? Experiments in Debt Collection

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2025-04-01

  reportOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  How good is AI at persuading humans to perform costly actions?We study calls made to get delinquent consumer borrowers to repay.Regression discontinuity and a randomized experiment reveal that AI is substantially less effective than human callers.Replacing AI with humans six days into delinquency closes much of the gap.But borrowers initially contacted by AI have repaid 1% less of the initial late payment one year later and are more likely to miss subsequent payments than borrowers who were always called by humans.AI's lesser ability to extract promises that feel binding may contribute to the performance gap.

  PublisherDOI

• Practical Finance: An Approximate Solution to Lifecycle Portfolio Choice

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
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• Optimal illiquidity

  Journal of Financial Economics · 2025-01-18 · 4 citations

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• Automating Short-Term Payroll Savings: Evidence from Two Large U.K. Experiments

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Employer-Based Short-Term Savings Accounts

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2024-01-01 · 4 citations

  reportOpen access

  We study the introduction of a choice architecture design intended to increase short-term savings among employees at five U.K. firms. Employees were offered the opportunity to opt into a payroll deduction program that auto-deposits funds from each paycheck into a short-term savings account from which withdrawals are possible at any time. We find that employees who opted into the program kept using it. Among employees whose accounts were created early enough to be observed over the first 12 months after their account activation and who did not separate from employment during this period, 96% still had a balance greater than £1 and 87% received an automatic payroll contribution in month 12. However, product take-up was very low: no more than 0.7% of eligible employees ever activated an account. Opt-in access to short-term savings programs does not elicit widespread participation.

  PublisherDOI

• Smaller than We Thought? The Effect of Automatic Savings Policies

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2024-08-01 · 24 citations

  reportOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Medium-and long-run dynamics undermine the effect of automatic enrollment and default savingsrate auto-escalation on retirement savings.Our analysis of nine 401(k) plans incorporates the facts that employees frequently leave firms (often before matching contributions from their employer have fully vested), a large percentage of 401(k) balances are withdrawn upon employment separation, and many employees opt out of auto-escalation.Steady-state saving rates increase by 0.6% of income due to automatic enrollment and 0.3% of income due to default autoescalation.Only 40% of those with an auto-escalation default escalate on their first escalation date, and more opt out later.

  PublisherDOI

• Automating Short-Term Payroll Savings: Evidence from Four Large U.K. Experiments

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2024-06-01

  reportOpen access

  Automatic enrollment is often used to increase retirement savings.What are the effects of using it (or, alternatively, requiring an active enrollment choice) to increase short-term savings?We evaluate two experiments in the U.K. at employers that enable workers to set up payroll contributions to fund short-term savings accounts.In the first experiment (N = 7,404), employees at two firms were randomly assigned opt-in, opt-out, or active choice enrollment into the shortterm savings program.Nine months later, participation was 48 percentage points higher under automatic enrollment than opt-in enrollment, and average balances were £114 higher.In the second experiment (N = 3,605), after years of offering opt-in payroll contributions to fund a short-term savings account, the employer changed to opt-out enrollment for new hires only.In tenure month 18, participation in the short-term savings program was 48 percentage points higher under automatic enrollment, and average balances were £193 higher.

  PublisherDOI

• Does Pension Automatic Enrollment Increase Debt? Evidence from a Large-Scale Natural Experiment

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2024-02-01 · 15 citations

  reportOpen access

  Does automatic enrollment into retirement saving increase household debt?We study the randomized roll-out of automatic enrollment pensions to ~160,000 employers in the United Kingdom with 2-29 employees.We find that the additional savings generated through automatic enrollment are partially offset by increases in unsecured debt.Over the first 41 months after enrollment, each additional month increases the average automatically enrolled employee's pension savings by £32-£38, unsecured debt (such as personal loans and bank overdrafts) by £7, the likelihood of having a mortgage by 0.05 percentage points, and mortgage balances by £118.Automatic enrollment causes loan defaults to fall and credit scores to rise modestly.

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Frequent coauthors

• Brigitte C. Madrian

  Brigham Young University

  349 shared

• David Laibson

  Harvard University Press

  306 shared

• John Beshears

  National Bureau of Economic Research

  244 shared

• Hongjun Yan

  DePaul University

  92 shared

• Li Jin

  Beihang University

  81 shared

• Andrew Metrick

  71 shared

• Emily Haisley

  68 shared

• Jennifer Kurkoski

  Google (United States)

  68 shared

Awards & honors

• TIAA Paul A. Samuelson Award for outstanding scholarly writi…
• 40 Under 40 Most Outstanding MBA Professors , Poets & Quants…
• NBER Pre-Doctoral Fellow in Aging and Health Economics (2003…
• Harvey Fellow, Mustard Seed Foundation (2003-2005)
• National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (20…