Previous empirical literature has found a sharp decline in consumption during the first years of retirement implying that individuals do not save enough for their retirement. This phenomenon has been called the retirement consumption puzzle. In contrast to some of the previous studies, the...

Over the past few decades, risks associated with providing for financial security in retirement have increasingly shifted from employers to employees as employer-provided pensions have shifted from defined-benefit to defined-contribution (DC) plans. Recent work in behavioral finance suggests...

Euler equation estimation of intertemporal consumption models imposes heavy demands on data and identifiability conditions. For example, one typically needs panel data on consumption, assumptions on expectations, and a parameterization of preferences. The authors aim at reducing some of these...

Many countries are including personal retirement accounts (PRAs) as part of their social security systems. PRA systems boost private savings at the macro level by converting a government financial liability into private wealth. At the micro level, however, crowing-out effects on household...

Inter-vivos cash transfers and bequests between family members total hundreds of billions of dollars each year. They may equalize resources within a generation of a family as well as across family generations. Transfers delayed to the end of life may represent a significant motive for saving....

The simple one-good model of life-cycle consumption requires "consumption smoothing." According to previous results based on partial spending and on synthetic panels, British and U.S. households apparently reduce consumption at retirement. The reduction cannot be explained by the simple one-good...

The simple one-good model of life-cycle consumption requires that consumption be continuous over retirement; yet prior research based on partial measures of consumption or on synthetic panels indicates that spending drops at retirement, a result that has been called the retirement-consumption...

In this paper the authors examine the scope of cross-country variation in institutions related to social insurance. Building on the variation they find they assess the value of new micro data that is comparable across countries to help identify key parameters of individual behavior. They present...

Individuals' subjective expectations are important in explaining heterogeneity in individual choices, but their elicitation poses challenges. In this paper, the authors present their findings from testing an innovative visual representation of an Internet survey in the context of individuals'...

The authors use eight waves from the European Community Household Panel (1994-2001) to analyze the intertemporal labor supply behaviour of married women in six European countries (Netherlands, France, Spain, Italy, Germany and United Kingdom) using dynamic binary choice models with different...