Whole life insurance plays an important role in household saving. However, empirical evidence on its determinants is scarce. This paper studies two natural experiments to identify the effects of tax incentives and bequest motives on life-insurance demand. An unanticipated tax reform in 2000...

We report the results of a field experiment evaluating the impact of financial literacy training on teenagers between 14 and 16 years in German high schools. After the training, treated teenagers exhibit a significant increase in both interest in financial matters and self-assessed knowledge...

How much retirement income is needed in order to maintain one's living standard at old age? As it is difficult to find a firm basis for an empirical treatment of this question, we employ a novel approach to assessing an adequate replacement rate vis- a-vis income in the pre-retirement period. We...

Using data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, we examine the impact of the Great Recession on subjective well-being (as measured by life satisfaction) and attempt to identify disparate effects by age. We find that those...

The rising importance of bequests as a source of personal income lead to renewed interest in the taxation of wealth transfers. Empirical evidence on distortionary effects of bequest taxation is relatively scarce. On the basis of administrative data for Germany, this paper assesses the extent to...

The rising importance of bequests as a source of personal income lead to renewed interest in the taxation of wealth transfers. Empirical evidence on distortionary effects of bequest taxation is relatively scarce. On the basis of administrative data for Germany, this paper assesses the extent to...

Empirically, not much is known about the mechanisms how labor market programs like job search assistance and training operate to support finding a job. This paper provides novel evidence to open the "blackbox": it causally links the program interventions to the dynamics of search behavior,...

Many initiatives worldwide aim at improving financial literacy through targeted education programs, yet there is little evidence regarding their effectiveness. We examine the impact of a short financial education program on teenagers in German high schools. Our findings reveal that the training...

We study the endowment effect and expectation-based reference points in the field leveraging the setup of the Socio-Economic Panel. Households receive a small item for taking part in the panel, and we randomly assign respondents either a towel or a notebook, which they can exchange at the end of...