We investigate whether lack of familiarity may contribute to an explanation of the gender gap in stock market participation and risk taking. We use ads in widely read women magazines to select companies that we assume to be more familiar to women than to men, and construct a “pink”...

This paper presents empirical evidence from the Netherlands indicating that the current policy based on information is unlikely to help people make the pension choices required in a system in which employees are the ultimate bearers of asset market risk. This holds even if information is made...

We present new evidence on financial literacy and retirement preparation in the Netherlands based on two surveys conducted before and after the onset of the financial crisis. We document that while financial knowledge did not increase from 2005 to 2010, significantly more individuals planned for...

In this study we gauge the impact of social interactions on individual retirement preferences. A survey including self-assessments and vignette questions shows that individual preferences are affected by preferences and actual retirement behavior of the social environment. Retirement from paid...

Despite its importance for the analysis of life-cycle behavior and, in particular, retirement planning, stock ownership by private households is poorly understood. Among other approaches to investigate these puzzles, recent research has started to elicit private households’ expectations of...

Using survey data from a representative sample of Dutch households, we estimate the strength of the precautionary saving motive by eliciting subjective expectations on future consumption. We find that expected consumption risk is higher for the young and the self-employed, and is correlated...

There is ample empirical evidence documenting widespread financial illiteracy and limited pension knowledge. At the same time, the distribution of wealth is widely dispersed and many workers arrive on the verge of retirement with few or no personal assets. In this paper, we investigate the...

Studies have found evidence that seemingly irrelevant details of an income component such as its label have an effect on how it is used. Using a data set with more than one million employee-month observations, we investigate the role of functional form assumptions and time aggregation in the...