We study the decision problem of the optimal choice between home equity release products from a retired homeowner's perspective in the presence of longevity, long-term care, house price, and interest rate risk. The individual can choose to release home equity using reverse mortgages or home...

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...

We introduce a robust investment strategy to hedge long dated liabilities under model misspecification and incomplete bond markets. A robust agent who worries about misspecified bond premia follows a min-max expected shortfall criterion to protect against model uncertainty. We employ a backward...

We study long-term care demand in the Netherlands for a sample of elderly Dutch households using detailed administrative data. Long-term care in the Netherlands is provided by a public health care system that is generous in comparison to that in many other countries, but offers few possibilities...

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....

We search for a trading strategy and the associated robust price of unhedgeable assets in incomplete markets under the acknowledgement of model uncertainty. Our set-up is that we postulate an agent who wants to maximise the expected surplus by choosing an optimal investment strategy....

We use two administrative data sets, from a large internet broker and from a major commercial bank, together with regional data to ask three questions: (i) whether financial advisors tend to be matched with poorer, uninformed investors or with richer, experienced but presumably busy investors;...

This paper uses international panel data on 55 countries from 1995 to 2008, merging indicators of financial literacy with a large set of macroeconomic and institutional variables. Results show that there is substantial heterogeneity of financial and economic competence across countries, and that...

In aging societies, information on how to reform a pension system is essential to policy makers. This study scrutinizes the introduction of early retirement disincentives by a major pension reform in Germany. Employing administrative pension data and a detailed model of the German tax and social...

This paper evaluates an American pension option, whereby participants have the option to convert their defined benefit (DB) pension entitlements of a collective scheme to an individual defined contribution (DC) plan, using contingent claim analysis. This way, we can evaluate the participation...