Faced with ageing populations, OECD governments are seeking policies to increase individual retirement saving. In April 2001, the UK government introduced Stakeholder Pensions – a low cost retirement saving vehicle. The reform also changed the structure of tax-relieved contribution ceilings,...

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...

The low capital mobility among OECD countries, signalled by a high saving-investment (SI) relation and known as the Feldstein-Horioka puzzle, has triggered a lively discussion in the empirical literature. In this paper, we compare between, pooled, time and country dependent specifications of the...

Die Untersuchung analysiert das Sparverhalten der über 30- bis unter 50jährigen Personen bzw. Haushalte mit Haushaltsvorständen in dieser Altersgruppe in Reaktion auf erhaltene Erbschaften bzw. Transfers zu Lebzeiten. Zugrunde liegen aktuelle Daten des Sozio-oekonomischen Panels. Mittels...

Capital mobility is helpful to cope with the loss of adjustment instruments in EMU. High capital mobility in the sense of Feldstein and Horioka (FH) can limit the negative consequences of shocks affecting the saving capacity of an economy in the Eurozone. It is the aim of this paper to assess...

Diese Studie untersucht, wie sich Spartätigkeit und Geldvermögen deutscher Privathaushalte seit 1960 entwickelt haben. Mittels Regressionsanalysen läßt sich herausfinden, daß der Vermögensbestand einkommens- und altersabhängig ist. Es Wird gezeigt, daß Einkommen und Ersparnis...

After the collapse in the early years of transition, saving rates in many EU-accession countries have recovered and remained stable during recent years. This may indicate that the transformation process has come to an end with regard to savings. Is saving behaviour in EU-accession countries now...

Private savings mirror consumption behavior. In Europe, the dynamic of consumption is very low, and at the same time, savings are increasing. Is this a result of macroeconomic policy? A GMM estimator is used to analyze the determinants of private saving in the EU?s 15 member states. Our main...

This paper focuses on the role of habit formation in individual preferencesover consumption and saving. We closely relate to Alessie and Lusardi's(1997) model as we estimate a model which is based on their closed-formsolution, where saving is expressed as a function of lagged saving and...

Since the beginnings of the eighties house prices in the Netherlands haveincreased steadily and considerably. In this paper we study the effect of this developmenton the demand for second mortgages and on the savings of Dutch households. We use the dataof the Dutch socio-economic panel for the...