The family home is the most important asset on household balance sheets, aside from human capital. Choosing a suitable mortgage is therefore critical to financial well-being but households often make costly mistakes. We collect data in an online survey to test borrowers' comfort with, and...

We implement a two-country online choice experiment on around 2000 respondents per country, first, to investigate the formation of subjective survival expectations; and second, to evaluate the relation between subjective survival expectations and attitudes to pension regulations. Each respondent...

The number of self-managed superannuation funds (SMSFs) has grown at more than 5% p.a. over the past five years. The net growth rate consists of 7% new SMSFs and 2% closures. More than 570,000 SMSFs now serve over one million members but little is known about the experiences of members. We...

Self-managed superannuation funds (SMSFs) – small retirement savings funds with four or fewer members – now manage almost one third of retirement savings in Australia, and serve over one million members. The number of SMSFs has increased to more than half a million in two decades. Yet little...

Using eight years of data drawn from the records of Australia's Centrelink agency, we describe the income, asset and decumulation patterns of over 10,000 age pensioners. Analysis of this longitudinal data set shows that age pensioners, on average, preserve both financial and residential wealth,...

Modeling of subjective survival is critical to the use of mortality expectations in economic models and the life insurance industry. Subjective scaling factors that are used to adjust average survival probabilities for individual expectations are often based on a single observation of personal...

This research studies whether individuals make choices consistent with expected utility maximization in allocating wealth between a lifetime annuity and a phased withdrawal account at retirement. The paper describes the construction and administration of a discrete choice experiment to 854...