Jamie Hentall-MacCuish

ifo/CESifo Visiting Researcher

Jamie Hentall-MacCuish, HEC Paris, CESifo Guest from 23 to 27 March 2026.

Costly Attention and Retirement

Jamie Hentall-MacCuish’s work has focused on intergenerational inequality and also on the economic implications of human cognitive constraints. In his working paper “Costly Attention and Retirement” he examines the role of these constraints in explaining retirement behavior. Using UK data, the paper first documents the prevalence of incorrect beliefs about the pension eligibility age and shows that the size of these belief errors earlier in life predicts individuals’ employment responses when they reach pension age. It then asks whether these mistaken beliefs can help to explain the puzzlingly large (given financial incentives) employment response to pension eligibility age. To do this, it builds a model in which rationally inattentive households learn about uncertain pension policy that replicates some important patterns in the beliefs data, namely that learning seems to happen along the extensive and intensive margins and belief errors seem to respond to incentives to be learn about the pension policy. This model, in which rationally inattentive households learning about uncertain pension policy endogenously generates misbeliefs, explains 51% of the excessive (given financial incentives) drop in employment at SPA when constrained to replicate the belief data patterns and completely explain it when not. 

Mr. Hentall-MacCuish is an applied structural econometrician working on topics across the lifecycle from the development of cognitive and non-cognitive skills in childhood to the determinants of retirement behavior later in life. He has work forthcoming at the Journal of Political Economy and under review at the Review of Economic Studies. While visiting CESifo, he intends to continue investigating the role of misbeliefs in determining the labor supply and saving behaviors of older individuals by learning more about the German system and the important work that is being undertaken at the ifo Institute to understand how pension information provision changes these behaviors. 

Jamie Hentall-MacCuish is an Assistant Professor at HEC Paris. He completed his PhD at University College London (UCL) in 2023 and is a research associate at the Institute for Fiscal Studies (London), where he was a research scholar during his PhD studies.