Mortgages constitute the largest part of household debt. An essential choice when taking out a mortgage is between fixed-interest-rate mortgages (FRMs) and adjustable-interest-rate mortgages (ARMs). However, so far, no comprehensive cross-country study has analyzed what determines household...

This paper analyses empirically how cross-border consumption varies across product and services categories and across household characteristics. It focuses on the part of crossborder sales that arise due to work-related cross-border crossings; it analyses the crossborder consumption behaviour of...

This study investigates whether and how the crisis in 2008/2009 aects households' risk attitudes, subjective risk and return expectations, and planned - financial risk taking using the German SAVE study. Households' wealth change from end-2007 to end-2009 is not found to have an eect. However,...

Die Finanz- und Wirtschaftskrise hat auch bei der staatlich geförderten Altersvorsorge (Riester-Rente) Spuren hinterlassen: Die Analyse der SAVE-Befragung 2009 zeigt, dass der Verbreitungsgrad der Riester-Rente Ende des Jahres 2008 stagnierte. Diese Stagnation betraf allerdings nicht die...

Die starken Vermögensverluste einzelner Anlageklassen in 2008 durch die Finanz- und aufkommende Wirtschaftskrise führte zu einer Diskussion über die Risiken der kapitalgedeckten Altersvorsorge. Diese Studie quantifiziert die Höhe der Vermögensverluste und Renditeeinbußen durch die Finanz-...

Financing pensions in the EU is a challenge. Many EU countries introduced private pension schemes to compensate declining public pension levels due to reforms made necessary by demographic change. In 2001, Germany introduced the Riester pension. Ten years after introduction the prevalence rate...

While life-cycle theory makes the clear prediction that people dissave at old-age, this prediction is not at all borne out by the data from many countries. Various suggestions have been made to explain this discrepancy. This paper sheds more light on the effect of the exclusion of...

We study how and to what extent private households are affected by the recent financial crisis and how their financial decisions are influenced by this shock. Our analysis reveals that individuals with low levels of financial literacy are less likely to have invested in the stock market and thus...

Questions about monetary variables (such as income, wealth or savings) are key components of questionnaires on household finances. However, missing information on such sensitive topics is a well-known phenomenon which can seriously bias any inference based only on complete cases analysis. Many...

Da etwa ¾ aller Selbständigen nicht durch ein obligatorisches Altersvorsorgewerk abgesichert sind, stellt sich die Frage, inwieweit Altersarmut für diese Selbständigen zum Problem werden könnte. Eine eingehende Untersuchung des Altersvorsorge-Verhaltens von Selbständigen er-scheint daher...