Financing pensions in the EU is a challenge. Many EU countries introduced private pension schemes to compensate declining public pension levels due to reforms made necessary by demographic change. In 2001, Germany introduced the Riester pension. Ten years after introduction the prevalence rate...

Economic theory suggests that households should invest their financial wealth in a combination of cash and a well-diversified equity portfolio. Yet, many households' equity investments are strongly concentrated in a few assets. Attempts to explain this discrepancy have included low levels of...

The German population has good financial knowledge measured on the basis of three financial literacy questions. Around 85 % of the individuals comprehend the functioning of interest and inflation. And 60 % of the individuals understand the relationship of risk and diversification. Overall around...

This study investigates whether and how the crisis in 2008/2009 aects households' risk attitudes, subjective risk and return expectations, and planned - financial risk taking using the German SAVE study. Households' wealth change from end-2007 to end-2009 is not found to have an eect. However,...

This Paper provides a two-part empirical analysis on how actuarial reduction rates for early retirement affect current pension payments in Germany and to what extent the existence and the magnitude of such reduction rates influence people’s retirement planning. First, when looking at...

This paper provides the first joint analysis of household stockholding participation, location among stockholding modes, and participation spillovers. Our model matches observed participation, conditional and unconditional, and asset location patterns. We find that financial sophistication...

We study how and to what extent private households are affected by the recent financial crisis and how their financial decisions are influenced by this shock. Our analysis reveals that individuals with low levels of financial literacy are less likely to have invested in the stock market and thus...

We exploit data on German households’ savings in life insurance products, the characteristics of life insurance products and the specific tax treatment of savings in life insurance products to assess the importance of different savings motives and the effectiveness of tax incentives. Our...

In this paper we investigate the causal effect of years of schooling on health and health-related behavior in West Germany. We apply an instrumental variables approach using as natural experiments several changes in compulsory schooling laws between 1949 and 1969. These law changes generate...