This paper is centered on the complementary roles played by pension communication/information and financial literacy for a sustainable and equitable nonfinancial defined contribution (NDC) system at both the micro and macro socioeconomic level. The paper presents new evidence on: (i) the concern...

This paper studies the effect of a change in real estate wealth on the consumption behaviour of Italian households, using the Bank of Italy's Survey of Household Income and Wealth dataset. We relate annual household consumption to capital gains in housing, controlling for characteristics such as...

According to economic theory, elderly homeowners should be much more eager than they actually are to adopt financial instruments allowing them to borrow against home equity. This paper investigates the determinants of interest for the Italian elderly in one such instrument, the reverse mortgage....

A growing body of literature shows that financial literacy affects household savings and investment choices. Less attention has, however, been devoted to its effect on debt behavior. This paper contributes to filling this gap by considering how financial literacy influences household attitudes...

This analysis evaluates the relative pension positions of men and women, under different characterisations of their respective working lives and pension designs. Both Defined Benefit (DB) and Defined Contribution (DC) schemes are considered, as well as a few variants of their basic pension...

The concept of familiarity has been used in finance theory to explain apparent paradoxes in people's behavior, such as the home bias in portfolio choices. This study investigates whether (lack of) familiarity with the language of financial consumers may contribute to an explanation of the...

Financial literacy has important implications for economic reforms. Reforms are meant to change people's behavior and their effectiveness crucially depends on the ability of citizens to recognize and generally approve, their necessity, their general design and their “sense of direction”....