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...

We study the role of household saving behaviour, of individual motives for saving and that of perceived liquidity constraints in 15 Euro Area countries. The empirical analysis is based on the Household Finance and Consumption Survey, a new harmonized data set collecting detailed information on...

This paper documents the implementation of a logical imputation based on the panel structure of the 2003 to 2008 waves of the German SAVE dataset. A new release of the waves 2003-2008 will be available from June 2009. The concept and the principles of the underlying logical panel imputation are...

This study aims at estimating the losses in old-age wealth and forfeited returns. The analysis is based on the German SAVE study in 2008. In comparison to a scenario without the crisis individuals on average lost 4.3% of their financial wealth. Considering only wealth in investment classes...

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...

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 analysed what determines household...

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,...