Technology now makes it possible to understand efficiently and at large scale how people use language to reveal their everyday thoughts, behaviors, and emotions. Written text has been analyzed through both theory-based, closed-vocabulary methods from the social sciences as well as data-driven, open-vocabulary methods from computer science, but these approaches have not been comprehensively compared. To provide guidance on best practices for automatically analyzing written text, this narrative review and quantitative synthesis compares five predominant closed- and open-vocabulary methods: Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC), the General Inquirer, DICTION, Latent Dirichlet Allocation, and Differential Language Analysis. We compare the linguistic features associated with gender, age, and personality across the five methods using an existing dataset of Facebook status updates and self-reported survey data from 65,896 users. Results are fairly consistent across methods. The closed-vocabulary approaches efficiently summarize concepts and are helpful for understanding how people think, with LIWC 2015 yielding the strongest, most parsimonious results. Open-vocabulary approaches reveal more specific and concrete patterns across a broad range of content domains, better address ambiguous word senses, and are less prone to misinterpretation, suggesting that they are well-suited for capturing the nuances of everyday psychological processes. We detail several errors that can occur in closed-vocabulary analyses, the impact of sample size, number of words per user and number of topics included in open-vocabulary analyses, and implications of different analytical decisions. We conclude with recommendations for researchers, advocating for a complementary approach that combines closed- and open-vocabulary methods.

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Many Americans live paycheck to paycheck, carry revolving credit balances, and have little liquidity to absorb financial shocks. One consequence of this financial vulnerability is that many individuals use a portion of their retirement savings during their working years. For every $1 that flows into 401(k)s and similar accounts, between 30¢ and 40¢ leaks out before retirement (Argento, Bryant, and Sabelhaus 2015). We explore the practical considerations and challenges associated with helping households accumulate liquid savings that can be deployed when urgent pre-retirement needs arise. Automatically enrolling workers into an employer-sponsored "rainyday" or "emergency" savings account-terms that we use interchangeably in this paper-funded by payroll deduction could be a cost-effective way to achieve this goal. We explore three specific implementation options: (a) after-tax employee 401(k) accounts; (b) deemed Roth IRAs under a 401(k) plan; and (c) depository institution accounts. We evaluate the pros and cons of each approach and conclude that all three approaches merit exploration and field testing. 2 We refer readers interested in a more concise treatment of these issues to the version of this paper published in Tax Policy and the Economy (forthcoming). 3 Liquid net worth includes all assets (except pension wealth; retirement savings accounts, e.g., 401(k) accounts and IRAs; homes; and durable assets) net of all debt (except student loans and collateralized debts, e.g., mortgages and car loans). 4 These distributions do not include IRA rollovers or Roth conversions. 5 provide liquidity when the funds are needed; the tax treatment of withdrawals; the ability to achieve effective psychological separation between rainy-day savings and retirement savings so that rainy-day accounts do not encourage leakage of retirement savings; the target size of the rainyday account; the ability to automatically enroll employees in the rainy-day account; employers' ability to match employee contributions to the rainy-day account; compliance and potential interactions with the nondiscrimination rules that apply to tax-qualified employer-sponsored plans;the investment of the rainy-day savings, including fees and expenses; and the need to manage account transitions when employees separate from an employer.In Sections IV-VI, we discuss three specific implementation models and their pros and cons given existing regulatory regimes. First, we discuss using after-tax employee contribution accounts within a 401(k) plan as the vehicles for rainy-day saving. Second, we discuss using deemed Roth IRAs associated with a 401(k) plan as the vehicles for rainy-day saving. Finally, we discuss going outside the qualified and ERISA plan system and using bank accounts or other depository institution accounts as the vehicles for rainy-day saving. 7 While the first two models would be limited to employees of firms that offer a retirement plan, the third could also be suitable for employees who are ineligible for a 401(k) and for the self-employed or ...

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