This paper studies how peers’ financial behaviour affects individuals’ own investment choices. To identify the peer effect, we exploit the composition of the Luxembourg population and use the differ-ences in stock market participation across various immigrant groups to study the effect on...

While life-cycle theory makes the clear prediction that people dissave at old-age, this prediction is not at all borne out by the data from many countries. Various suggestions have been made to explain this discrepancy. This paper sheds more light on the effect of the exclusion of...

Mortgages constitute the largest part of household debt. An essential choice when taking out a mortgage is between fixed-interest-rate mortgages (FRMs) and adjustable-interest-rate mortgages (ARMs). However, so far, no comprehensive cross-country study has analyzed what determines household...

Questions about monetary variables (such as income, wealth or savings) are key components of questionnaires on household finances. However, missing information on such sensitive topics is a well-known phenomenon which can seriously bias any inference based only on complete-case analysis. Many...

Die Finanz- und Wirtschaftskrise hat auch bei der staatlich geförderten Altersvorsorge (Riester-Rente) Spuren hinterlassen: Die Analyse der SAVE-Befragung 2009 zeigt, dass der Verbreitungsgrad der Riester-Rente Ende des Jahres 2008 stagnierte. Diese Stagnation betraf allerdings nicht die...

This paper documents the implementation of a logical imputation based on the panel structure of the 2003 to 2008 waves of the German SAVE dataset. A new release of the waves 2003-2008 will be available from June 2009. The concept and the principles of the underlying logical panel imputation are...