This paper analyses the impact of health, pension systems and longevity on savings. It uses a simple life-cycle model embodying social transfers (health care and pension expenditures) and changes in longevity to determine the level of household savings. From this model, we derived an econometric...

In this paper we consider the influence of the demography on the dynamic equilibrium of an economy. More precisely, we focus on mandatory pensions, as in most Western countries except USA and Switzerland the role of ‘the third pension-pillar,' based on voluntary savings, is relatively minor....

According to the permanent income/life-cycle hypothesis (PILCH), under standard preferences anticipated changes in employment status should not affect the changes in consumption. In this paper, we investigate the consumption behaviour of individuals who lose their jobs and those who find a job....

Each year, many pregnant Muslim women fast during Ramadan. Using Indonesian cross-sectional data and building upon work of Almond & Mazumder (2009), I show that people who were prenatally exposed to Ramadan fasting have a poorer general health than others. As predicted by medical theory, this...

This paper investigates how risk attitudes change over the life course. We study the age trajectory of risk attitudes all the way from early adulthood until old age, in large representative panel data sets from the Netherlands and Germany. Age patterns are generally difficult to identify...

This paper investigates the impact of financial incentives on early retirement behaviour for high and low wage earners. Using a stylized life-cycle model, we derive hypotheses on the behaviour of the two types. We use administrative data and employ two identification strategies to test the...

This paper provides new evidence on individual preferences over annuities and lump sum payments based on hypothetical questions posed in the DNB Household Survey in 2005. Contrary to the majority of papers in the annuitization puzzle literature, this study allows to control explicitly for the...

Target-Date Funds (TDFs) are popular retirement investment vehicles that follow a predetermined schedule for rebalancing their mix of equity and fixed-income securities over time. We explore potential agency problems in TDFs by examining their return performance and their flow-performance...

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...

This paper assesses the sophistication of pension funds’ investment policies using data on 748 Dutch pension funds during the 1999–2006 period. We develop three indicators of sophistication: gross rounding of investment choices, investments in alternative sophisticated asset classes and...