This paper assesses the impact of a dramatic reform of the Dutch pension system on mental health, savings behavior and retirement expectations of workers nearing retirement age. The reform means that public sector workers born on January 1, 1950 or later face a substantial reduction in their...

This paper evaluates approximation methods to make manageable the numerical solution of overlapping generation models with aggregate risk. The paper starts with a model in which households maximize expected utility over their life cycle. Instantaneous utility is characterized by constant...

Studies have found evidence that seemingly irrelevant details of an income component such as its label have an effect on how it is used. Using a data set with more than one million employee-month observations, we investigate the role of functional form assumptions and time aggregation in the...

The so-called retirement-savings puzzle is a phenomenon by which, contrary to what the basic life-cycle model predicts, households do not run down their wealth significantly during retirement. In this survey paper we briefly review the literature that attempts to solve the retirement-savings...

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...

In this paper we examine the effect of widowhood on asset trajectories. In many industrialized countries, close to half of households are headed by women single, divorced, separated or widowed and therefore their ability to make financial decisions is crucial for their economic well‐being as...

In this paper I analyse the effect of a decrease in house prices on the savings of households. The life cycle model predicts that homeowners compensate an unexpected decrease in home equity by increasing their savings, and that the effect becomes stronger as the age of the household increases....

This paper analyses the impact of health, pension systems and longevity on savings. It uses a simple life-cycle model embodying social transfers (health care and pension expenditures) and changes in longevity to determine the level of household savings. From this model, we derived an econometric...

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...

We study the displacement effect of mandatory occupational pension saving on private household wealth in the Netherlands, separately for wage-employed and self-employed. We use rich administrative data on (pension) wealth and income and apply a range of identification strategies, from IV...