We study how and to what extent private households are affected by the recent financial crisis and how their financial decisions are influenced by this shock. Our analysis reveals that individuals with low levels of financial literacy are less likely to have invested in the stock market and thus...

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...

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 cases analysis. Many...

The financial and economic crisis also left its mark on the privately funded old-age provision (Riester-Pension) in Germany: an analysis of the SAVE panel dataset shows that the coverage with Riester-contracts stagnated in 2008. Only households with low incomes exhibited small but positive...

Financing pensions in the EU is a challenge. Many EU countries introduced private pensions schemes to compensate declining public pensions levels due to reforms made necessary by demographic change. In 2001, Germany introduced the Riester pension. Ten years after introduction the prevalence rate...

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...

One important parameter in the decision process when buying a private annuity is individuals´ subjective life expectancy, because it directly influences the expected rate of return. We examine the market for private annuities in Germany and evaluate potential selection effects based on...

English Abstract: Flexible retirement is supposed to increase labor supply of older workers without touching the third rail of pension politics, the highly unpopular increase of the retirement age. While this may have intuitive appeal, this paper shows that it might be wishful thinking. Economic...

This study examines how knowledge about institutional settings and their reform affects the effectiveness of those reforms. We examine this question in the context of social security, the largest social insurance program in Europe, by exploiting time and cross-country variation in pension...