We explore how members of a collective pension scheme can share inflation risks in the absence of suitable financial market instruments. Using intergenerational risk sharing arrangements, risks can be allocated better across the various participants of a collective pension scheme than would be...

We examined the mortgage interest tax relief (MIR) system in the Netherlands and reforms to this system, based on answers to direct questions in survey data for the period 2010-2012. As well as tracking individuals over time and at strategic moments in the process of the policy reform, this...

We analyze whether uncertainty related to the outcome of future policy results in precautionary saving. We focus on an important cause of policy uncertainty for households in the Netherlands: the possible limitation of the mortgage interest deduction. To isolate the effect of policy uncertainty...

Precautionary savings have often been analyzed with regard to its impact on current savings. This work focuses instead on the impact of uncertainty on savings under bequest form. We thus turn the focus on estimating whether and to what extent income variability does have an effect on post-mortem...

In this paper we extend the traditional life cycle model of saving and portfolio choice to allow for possible long-term unemployment spells to have permanent effects on subsequent labor income prospects. The risk of losing future labor income could imply strong human capital erosion for the...

I investigate a dynamic life-cycle strategic asset allocation and consumption problem under model uncertainty, where both inflation rate and income growth rate are assumed to be estimated with errors. I present a feasible boundary for the uncertainty aversion parameter, which measures the...

How can public pension systems be reformed to ensure fiscal stability in the face of increasing life expectancy? To address this question, we use micro data to estimate a structural life-cycle model of individuals' employment, retirement and consumption decisions. We calculate that, in the case...

We develop a novel argument why better public information can help countries to insure against idiosyncratic risk. Representative agents of developing and industrial countries receive public and private signals on their future income realization and engage in risk-sharing contracts with limited...

This paper proposes a structural approach to long-horizon asset allocation. In particular, the investor draws inferences about asset returns from a vector autoregression (VAR) with economic restrictions on the intercept, slope, and covariance matrix implied by the long-run risk model of Bansal...

Using survey data from a representative sample of Dutch households, we estimate the strength of the precautionary saving motive by eliciting subjective expectations on future consumption. We find that expected consumption risk is higher for the young and the self-employed, and is correlated...