Our study is the

rst to try a default manipulation as a way to inuence savings decisions

of low-income tax

lers. More generally, ours is one of the few to investigate how defaults
a
ect savings behavior, outside of the particular setting of decisions about 401(k
) contributions.
Thus, our experiment provides an opportunity to see whether the large impact of
default interventions in the previous literature generalize to other, policy rel
evant settings.
The fact that we

nd no discernible e
ect of the default manipulation raises questions about
the power of defaults for di
erent populations and the mechanisms underlying default effects.
In this section, we discuss potential explanations for the contrasting results,
drawing
on ancillary evidence from our surveys of tax

lers and tax preparers.

In our survey of tax preparers, we asked about several potential reasons for the
weak
e
ect of the treatment, and one explanation emerged as the clear favorite: 79 perc
ent of
preparers observed that