This paper contributes to the ESF Forward Look project “Ageing, Health and Pensions in Europe” by providing an overview of policy questions and research literature on the adequacy of saving for old age in European countries. Given the current status and practices, the paper describes...

This paper reports on several self-assessed and objective measures of financial literacy newly added to the American Life Panel (ALP), and it links these performance measures to efforts consumers make to plan for retirement. We evaluate the causal relationship between financial literacy and...

We examined financial literacy among the young using data from the 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. We showed that financial literacy is low among the young; fewer than one-third of young adults possess basic knowledge of interest rates, inflation, and risk diversification. Financial...

This study exploits a new dataset in order to quantify the effect of financial incentives on retirement choices. This dataset contains - for the first time in Italy - information on seniority. In accordance with the general finding in Gruber and Wise (2004), we find that financial incentives...

In the present paper I develop a life-cycle portfolio choice model where agents perceive stock returns to be ambiguous and are ambiguity averse. As in Epstein and Schneider (2005) part of the ambiguity vanishes over time as a consequence of learning over observed returns. The model shows that...

Non professional investors display a much higher degree of home bias than financial investors suggesting that they might be more severely affected by information asymmetry issues. In particular, non professional investors, having less easily access to information on foreign firm-specific...

Many older US households have done little or no planning for retirement, and there is a substantial population that seems to undersave for retirement. Of particular concern is the relative position of older women, who are more vulnerable to old-age poverty due to their longer longevity. This...

In this paper we study the effect on Italian households’ saving behaviour of a change in real estate wealth using the Bank of Italy’s Survey of Household Income and Wealth (SHIW) dataset. We relate annual household saving to capital gains in housing, controlling for other characteristics...