This paper provides a two-part empirical analysis on how actuarial reduction rates for early retirement affect current pension payments in Germany and to what extent the existence and the magnitude of these reduction rates influence people s retirement planning. First, by evaluating a large...

Existing work on the economics of well-being suggests that a person's subjective well-being depends to a large degree on his relative standing within his social environment. In this paper, we examine whether access to modern information and telecommunication technologies has an impact on...

We examine within a life-cycle set-up the choice of health and retirement. Health care contributes to a reduction in both mortality, determining the need to accumulate retirement wealth, and in morbidity, determining the disutility of work. The retirement age affects health through the value of...

We study the Medicare Part D prescription drug insurance program as a bellwether for designs of private, non-mandatory health insurance markets that control adverse selection and assure adequate access and coverage. The value that Part D or other prescription drug coverage has for an individual...

We demonstrate that upward-looking comparisons induce "keeping up with the richer Joneses"-behavior. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we estimate the effect of reference consumption, defined as the consumption level of all households who are perceived to be richer, on household...

We use the German re-unification as a natural experiment to understand drivers of financial literacy accumulation. With the transformation from a planned to a market-based economy in 1990, the incentives to invest in financial literacy were changed exogenously for East Germans and remained the...

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

We propose and axiomatically characterize a representation of ambiguity sensitive preferences. The distinguishing feature of our axiomatization is that we do not require preferences to be event-wise separable over any domain of acts. Even without any such separability restrictions, we are able...

This paper presents a class of finite n x n bimatrix (2-player) games we coin Circulant Games. In Circulant Games, each player's payoff matrix is a circulant matrix, i.e.\ each row vector is rotated one element relative to the preceding row vector. We show that when the payoffs in the first row...

This paper analyzes intertemporal effort provision in two-stage tournaments. A principal with a fixed budget for prizes faces two risk-neutral agents. He observes noisy signals of effort in both periods. His goal is to maximize either total efforts (perfect substitutes) or the product of first-...