This paper studies and documents household participation in voluntary individual retirement accounts (IRAs) in eleven European countries. Using recently available, internationally comparable data of households aged 50+, we calculate country-by-country average marginal effects of the probability...

We employ a life-cycle model with income risk to analyze how tax-deferred individual accounts affect households' savings for retirement. We consider voluntary accounts as opposed to mandatory accounts with minimum contribution rates. We contrast add-on accounts with carve-out accounts that...