We use a life cycle model of consumption and portfolio choice to study the effects of social security on the investment decisions of households for the European case. Our model is mainly based on the one developed by Cocco, Gomes, and Maenhout (2005). We extend it by unemployment risk using...

We document that home ownership of households with 'heads' aged 25-44 years fell substantially between 1980 and 2000 and recovered only partially during the 2001-2005 housing boom. The 1980-2000 decline in young home ownership occurred as improvements in mortgage opportunities seemingly made it...

We specify a structural life-cycle model of consumption, labour supply and job mobility in an economy with search frictions that allows us to distinguish between different sources of risk and to estimate their effects. The sources of risk are shocks to productivity, job destruction, the process...

This paper assesses the accuracy of decomposing income risk into permanent and transitory components using income and consumption data. We develop a specific approximation to the optimal consumption growth rule and use Monte Carlo evidence to show that this approximation can provide a robust...

In this paper we reassess the evidence on labor income risk. There are two leading views on the nature of the income process in the current literature. The .first view, which we call the .Restricted Income Profiles.(RIP) process, holds that individuals are subject to large and very persistent...

The saving ratio of households in Germany has increased in the past few years when the income trend was weak. This could be due to precautionary saving. In this paper, the importance of precautionary saving against income uncertainty is analyzed empirically using micro data from the German...

This paper documents a marked increase in international consumption risk sharing throughout the recent globalization period. Unlike earlier studies that have found it difficult to document a consistent effect of financial globalization on international consumption comovements, we make use of the...

This paper analyses the relationship between education, gender and earnings in France and Germany. The model chosen here enables to estimate the impact of education not only on the expected earnings level but also on their dispersion, taking gender-specific sample selectivity into account. The...

Zunehmende Risiken im Lebenslauf und die Forderung nach vermehrter individueller Flexibilität stellen eine Herausforderung für die adäquate Gestaltung sozialer Sicherung dar, z. B. für die Alterssicherung. In diesem Beitrag wird dargestellt, wie soziale Risiken in öffentlichen und...

This is a paper based on the annual lecture in honour of Hugo Sinzheimer at November 10, 2005, Hugo-Sinzheimer-Institute at the University of Amsterdam. In 1928, Sinzheimer wrote an article entitled 'Die Demokratisierung des Arbeitsverhältnisses,' (The Democratisation of the Employment...