How to invest and decumulate wealth during retirement has far-reaching consequences for consumption during retirement. We conduct an online experiment among 2,500 individuals representative of the adult German population. First, we investigate the choice between phased withdrawal plans with...

How can retirement savings be increased? We explore a unique policy change in the context of the German pension system to study this question. As of 2004, the German pension authority started to send out annual letters providing detailed and comprehensible information about the pension system...

Flood insurance helps to cope with the risk of flooding, but take-up rates are relatively low. Insurance density could rise if index-based insurance (IBI) were provided as an alternative to traditional damage-based insurance (DBI). We analyze whether there is potential for private demand for IBI...

Trotz der sozialpolitischen Bedeutung, die der betrieblichen Altersvorsorge (bAV) seit den Rentenreformen der Neunziger- und Zweitausenderjahre zukommt, werden die unvollständige Evidenzlage, Intransparenz und fehlende Datengrundlagen in den letzten Jahren regelmäßig bemängelt. In diesem...

Public disability insurance (DI) programs in many countries face pressure to reduce their generosity in order to remain sustainable. In this paper, we investigate the welfare effects of giving a larger role to private insurance markets in the face of public DI cuts. Exploiting a unique reform...

I examine the financial fragility of German households during the second wave of COVID-19 infections in the winter of 2020/21 by analyzing the households' ability to come up with EUR 2,000 within one month. About one in three households reports being unable to cover an unexpected expense of EUR...

We examine the financial resilience of Austrian households, relating it to their experience of financial shocks earlier in life and to their financial literacy. We find that previous negative (positive) financial shocks are negatively (positively) related to financial resilience. Financial...

In this paper we investigate behavioral constraints to savings among smallholder farmers in rural Ethiopia. Increasing savings by overcoming such behavioral constraints has been documented to have positive effects on various outcomes such as health, education, and agricultural investments. We...

Im internationalen Vergleich verfügen die Deutschen über ein relativ hohes Finanzwissen. Allerdings bedeutet dies nicht, dass Finanzwissen universell verbreitet ist. Der Anteil der Befragten, die drei grundlegende Fragen zu Zins, Inflation und Risikodiversifikation beantworten können, liegt...

We exploit a large reform of capital-gains taxation in Germany combined with portfolio-level daily panel data to study the causal effect of taxes on individual stock-trading behavior and the disposition effect. We find substantial spikes in selling probabilities around an intertemporal tax...