Jeffrey R. Brown, Larry Gies Family Chair in Business and Dean Emeritus of Gies College of Business, has won the 2026 Robert I. Mehr Award from the American Risk and Insurance Association (ARIA). The honor is given annually to the Journal of Risk and Insurance paper, published a decade earlier, judged to have best stood the test of time.
The winning paper, "Framing and Claiming: How Information-Framing Affects Expected Social Security Claiming Behavior," was co-authored by Brown with Arie Kapteyn of the University of Southern California and Olivia S. Mitchell of the Wharton School, and appeared in the March 2016 issue of the journal.
"What makes this recognition especially meaningful is that the research had impact on two levels,” Brown said. “It advanced our scientific understanding of how people make important retirement decisions, and it also helped change the way Social Security communicates with the public. It’s gratifying when scholarship can both influence the academic conversation and make a tangible difference in people’s lives."
What the Paper Found
Using a randomized experiment fielded through the RAND American Life Panel, the authors set out to test a basic assumption underlying most economic models of retirement behavior: that people make decisions based purely on the consequences of their choices, not on how those choices happen to be described to them.
To test this, they exposed survey respondents to different ways of explaining how Social Security benefits change depending on the age at which someone claims them. All of the frames conveyed the same underlying facts. Only the presentation changed.
The results were striking. A "breakeven" framing – which tells people the age they'd need to live to in order for delaying benefits to "pay off" – pushed expected claiming ages roughly 15 months earlier than a neutral, symmetric description of the same benefit adjustments. The effect was strongest among people with lower financial literacy, those carrying credit card debt, and lower earners – groups the authors note are often the most financially vulnerable in retirement.
The researchers concluded that how the choice is framed shapes the choice itself, in defiance of the "invariance principle" that underpins standard expected-utility theory.
From Working Paper to Policy Change
What sets this research apart is that its influence began before formal publication. Brown recounts that when the deputy commissioner of the Social Security Administration learned of the team's findings while the study was still circulating as a working paper, the agency changed course – dropping the breakeven calculation from its standard claiming guidance.
That breakeven approach had been a fixture of how SSA field representatives discussed claiming decisions with the public for many years. The research showed that this seemingly neutral framing device was quietly nudging people toward claiming benefits earlier than they otherwise might have chosen – a decision with lasting consequences for retirement income, since Social Security remains the largest and only inflation-protected income source for most retirees.
Why It Still Matters
Ten years later, the paper's core finding – that something as simple as a framing choice can measurably shift a decision worth tens of thousands of dollars in lifetime income – continues to inform how policymakers, financial advisors, and researchers think about presenting retirement information. The Mehr Award recognizes research whose relevance has only grown since publication, and the study's direct fingerprint on federal policy makes it a rare example of academic research translating into real-world change well before the ink on the final publication had dried.
The award is named after Robert I. Mehr, a former finance professor at the University of Illinois, who was one of the pioneers of modern risk management and insurance as an academic discipline. He helped build one of the world's leading programs in insurance and risk management at Illinois. The American Risk and Insurance Association (ARIA) created the Robert I. Mehr Award to honor both his scholarly legacy and his enormous influence on the field.
In the spirit of making an impact on real lives, Brown has written a book that helps people think about how to ensure they can retire with confidence by focusing on income rather than wealth. “Will My Money Last?” will be published by Greenleaf in May 2027.