Why do similar households end up with very different levels of wealth? We show that differences in the attitudes and skills with which they approach financial planning are a significant factor. We use new and unique survey data to assess these differences and to measure each household's...

Two competing explanations for why consumers have trouble with financial decisions are gaining momentum. One is that people are financially illiterate since they lack understanding of simple economic concepts and cannot carry out computations such as computing compound interest, which could...

Proposals for mandatory private saving accounts differ in the degree of investment discretion that they provide to individual savers, and in their provisions for annuitization of accumulated assets. With respect to investment choices, some argue that individuals must be prevented from investing...

Deciding how much to save for retirement can be complicated. Drawing on a field experiment conducted with the Department of Defense, we study whether such complexity depresses participation in an employer-sponsored retirement saving plan. We find that simplifying one dimension of the enrollment...

We present new evidence on financial literacy and retirement preparation in the Netherlands based on two surveys conducted before and after the onset of the financial crisis. We document that while financial knowledge did not increase from 2005 to 2010, significantly more individuals planned for...

This paper analyzes retirement saving and portfolio choice in the United States, Italy, and the Netherlands. While these countries enjoy roughly the same standard of living, they vary widely in their institutional organization of retirement income provisions. Building on extensions of the life...

This paper presents a new multivariate copula-based modeling approach for analyzing cost-offsets between drug and nondrug expenditures. Estimates are based on panel data from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS) with quarterly measures of medical expenditures. The approach allows for...

We seek to analyze the extent and sources of network externalities for the automated clearinghouse (ACH) electronic payments system using a quarterly panel data set on individual bank adoption and usage of ACH. We provide three methods to identify network externalities using this panel data. The...

This paper introduces dynamics in the R&D to innovation and innovation to productivity relationships, which have mostly been estimated on cross-sectional data. It considers four nonlinear dynamic simultaneous equations models that include individual effects and idiosyncratic errors correlated...