Individuals are increasingly put in charge of their financial security after retirement. Moreover, the supply of complex financial products has increased considerably over the years. However, we still have little or no information about whether individuals have the financial knowledge and skills...

Since 2002 the German government seeks to stimulate private retirement savings by means of special allowances and tax exemptions - the so-called Riester scheme. We apply matching and panel regression techniques to assess the impact of the Riester scheme on households' propensities to save in a...

American households have received a triple dose of bad news since the beginning of the current recession: The greatest collapse in asset values since the Great Depression, a sharp tightening in credit availability, and a large increase in unemployment risk. We present measures of the size of...

Private wealth holdings are likely to become an increasingly important determinant in the job exit decision of elderly workers. Net wealth may correlate with worker's characteristics that also determine the exit out of a job. It is therefore important to include a rich set of observed...

The paper addresses two related issues: the optimal intergenerational sharing of laborproductivity risks, through a Pay-As-You-Go (PAYG) social security, and the mix ofPAYG and savings for retirement provision in a small open economy. It shows that partial contingency of the social security on...

Deciding how much to save for retirement is a difficult task that includes many uncertainties. In this paper, we use data from a representative Dutch household panel to study the impact of uncertainty regarding one's savings adequacy on retirement savings contributions and information search...