To counteract the financial pressure emerging in aging societies, statutory pay-as-you-go pension schemes are undergoing fundamental reforms in many Western countries. Starting with cohort 1937, Germany introduced permanent pension deductions for early retirement. This paper examines the...

To counteract the financial pressure emerging in aging societies, statutory pay-as-you-go pension schemes are undergoing fundamental reforms in many Western countries. Starting with cohort 1937, Germany introduced permanent pension deductions for early retirement. This paper examines the...

We study the relationship between fiscal policy and household saving across the euro area countries for the period 1999-2019. To this extent, we propose a thick modelling approach, which allows a vast number of model specifications in a dynamic panel setting. We find that fiscal expansions are...

In the wake of the financial crisis and continued volatility in international capital markets, there is growing interest in mechanisms that can protect people against retirement account volatility. This paper explores the consequences for savers' wellbeing of implementing market-based retirement...

In many countries, migrants hold less wealth than natives. This paper assesses how migrants and natives accumulate wealth over time by studying changes in net worth, referred to as savings, thereby contributing to the understanding of the migrant-native wealth gap. Relying on longitudinal data...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to derive the determinants of young adults' subjective and objective risk attitude in theoretical and real-world financial decisions. Furthermore, a comparison of the factors that influence young adults' and older adults' risk attitude is...

Exploiting the German reunification, we study how households adapt to a new environment in their macroeconomic forecasting. East Germans expect higher inflation than West Germans decades after reunification. These differences are likely driven by the persistent effect of the inflation shock...

Since the financial crisis financial literacy has attracted growing interest among researchers and policy makers, as there is international empirical evidence that financial literacy is poor among both adults and students. In Germany we have almost no empirical evidence on financial literacy,...

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 2005 (with a phase-in period between 2002-04), the German pension administration started to send out annual letters providing detailed and...

Since decades, only one fourth of German households invest in shares. One exception was during the three IPOs from 1996 to 2000 of the Deutsche Telekom, which gave Germans a taste to enter the stock market. However, the fall in the share price shortly after the second IPO, followed by corruption...