Private pension provision faces the challenging task of providing stable income streams during retirement. The challenge has increased markedly in the last decades due to volatile financial markets, falling interest rates and the withdrawal of employers and external insurers as risk bearers of...

Retail lending grew very fast in the New Europe region in the last years, prompting a debate on whether such a rapid growth can be considered sustainable. This paper investigates the main determinants of retail lending growth throughout the region. It tries to identify episodes of credit boom...

Chetty and Szeidl (2012) propose to estimate the effect of housing on portfolio choice by distinguishing between the effect of mortgage debt and the effect of home equity and by endogenizing these two variables. When replicating their study with French data, we obtain similar qualitative...

We study the life cycle of portfolio allocation following for 15 years a large random sample of Norwegian households using error-free data on all components of households’ investments drawn from the Tax Registry. Both, participation in the stock market and the portfolio share in stocks, have...

We investigate whether acquiring more education when young has long-term effects on risk-taking behavior in financial markets and whether the effects spill over to spouses and children. There is substantial evidence that more educated people are more likely to invest in the stock market....

We merge survey data on a sample of individual investors containing test-based measures of financial literacy with administrative records on their assets holding and trades before, during and after the financial crisis of September 2008. This dataset allows us to design three tests of the...

Savings accounts are owned by most households, but little is known about the performance of households’ investments. We create a unique dataset by matching information on individual savings accounts from the DNB Household Survey with market data on account-specific interest rates and...

This paper documents how poorer and less educated US households hold a smaller fraction of foreign assets in their financial portfolio. This average home bias of the poor is partly due to a lower probability of participating in foreign asset markets, often attributed to fixed costs of market...

We empirically study the determinants of intra-household decision power with respect to economic and financial choices using a suitable direct measure provided in the 1989-2010 Bank of Italy Survey of Household Income and Wealth. Focusing on a sample of couples, we evaluate the effect of each...