This paper analyses the role of the elderly couples’ past marital history in determining their current wealth holdings and portfolio allocation using data from the first wave of the Health and Retirement Study. The results suggest that, for those who remarry after divorce, there is recovery...

Private pension provision faces the challenging task of providing stable income streams during retirement. The challenge has increased markedly in the last decades due to volatile financial markets, falling interest rates and the withdrawal of employers and external insurers as risk bearers of...

Using a novel and unique dataset from Norway, we analyze whether professional proximity is associated with asymmetric information and abnormal returns. We find that individuals hold an excess weight in stocks that are professionally close. For example, after excluding holdings of own-company and...

This paper provides a broad empirical examination of the major currencies' roles in international capital markets, with a special emphasis on the first year of the Euro. A contribution is made as to how to measure these roles, both for international financing as well as for international...

Using a data-set that provides unprecedented details on individual investors’ stockholdings, we analyse whether investors take into account corporate governance when they select stocks. After controlling for the supply effect via free float and other firm characteristics, we find that all...

This is the first paper of which we are aware that attemps to formally model the supply-supply behavior of elderly individuals in a developing countryWithout broad-based public pension schemes, the majority of the elderly in developing countries are left to rely on their current and accumulated...

What drives the labor supply decisions of the elderly in developing countries? To what extent do elderly parents use coresidence with or financial transfers from children to reduce their own labor supply in old age? These questions are increasingly important because populations in many...

When entering retirement most people face the decision whether they would like their defined contribution account balance paid as a lump sum or to annuitize the amount. The fact that people tend to choose the lump sum even if economic reasons suggest not to is called the annuity puzzle. In a...

In the absence of a broad-based pension scheme, the elderly in developing countries may rely on monetary transfers made by their children and on their own labour supply. This paper examines whether monetary transfers from children help to reduce elderly parents’ need to work. Taking the...

We study the political determination of the level of social long-term care insurance when voters also choose private insurance and saving amounts. Agents differ in income, probability of becoming dependent and of receiving family help. Social insurance redistributes across income and risk...