This paper examines the saving behaviour of different generations of households in New Zealand over the period 1984 to 2010 using data from the Household Economic Survey. The paper employs a life-cycle framework to estimate regression models that identify the influence of age and birth year on...

Whole life insurance plays an important role in household saving. However, empirical evidence on its determinants is scarce. This paper studies two natural experiments to identify the effects of tax incentives and bequest motives on life-insurance demand. An unanticipated tax reform in 2000...

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...

We use administrative data for Norway to estimate an incomplete-market life-cycle model of retired singles and couples with a bequest motive, health-dependent utility, and uncertain longevity and health. We allow the parameters of the bequest utility to differ between households with and without...

This paper explores the relationship between the self-declared risk aversion of private investors and their propensity to hold incomplete portfolios of financial assets. The analysis is based on household survey data from the German Socioeconomic Panel (SOEP) that provides a reliable measure of...

We examine the extent to which owner-occupiers in their 50s and 60s change their private pension saving when they complete repayment of the mortgage on their primary residence. Using panel data from a household survey, the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing, we identify those who completed...

We designed a commitment savings product for a Philippine bank and implemented it using a randomized control methodology. The savings product was intended for individuals who want to commit now to restrict access to their savings, and who were sophisticated enough to engage in such a mechanism....

The aim of this paper is to understand what a recession means for individual consumers, and to model in a life-cycle framework how individuals respond to recessions. Our focus is on the sharp increase in savings rates that have been observed in the current and recent recessions. We show...

In this paper we analyze the impact of the expectations about future labor income on thesaving behavior of German households. We measure expectations on an individual basisinstead of generalized risk measures as it is common in existing studies. We use aunique panel data set on household...