Individuals are increasingly asked to take responsibility for preparing for retirement and available financial products to do so are growing in sophistication. A better understanding of how non-cognitive skills influence financial capability and retirement preparation could help effective policy design. This area of research has been hampered by the struggle to find reliable measures of these skills. I argue that questionnaires themselves can be seen as performance tasks, such that measures of survey effort could lead to meaningful measures of non-cognitive skills. I exploit the fact that I observe respondents taking multiple survey modules covering different topics in different moments of time to build survey effort measures in a nationally representative internet panel. I use survey effort measures along with self-reports to study the role of non-cognitive skills on retirement preparation and financial capability. My results show that non-cognitive skills can have a significant role, beyond the role of cognitive ability.
