We explore the effect on U.S. real GDP growth of the sharp and sustained decline in the global price of crude oil and hence in the U.S. price of gasoline after June 2014. Our analysis suggests that this decline produced a cumulative stimulus of about 0.9 percentage points of real GDP growth by...

We assess the evolution of spillover effects of unconventional monetary policies (UMPs) on Asia and the Pacific region, and evaluate the impact on and implications for the macroeconomy. We develop a Panel Vector Auto Regression model for Asia and the Pacific region for a period covering data...

The growth and popularity of defined contribution pensions, along with the government's increasing attention to retirement plan costs and investment choices provided, make it important to understand how people select their retirement plan investments. This paper shows how employees in a large...

Traditionally, households have been seen as acting as a single unit when it comes to savings. Although this might be correct for some parts of household savings, we question the correctness of the unitary model with respect to non-mandatory retirement savings. Therefore we analyze the...

We set up an agent-based macromodel focusing on consumption-saving without the assumption of utility maximization, but preserving certain "rational" aspects of human choice based on the idea of ecological rationality Todd et al. (2012). In this framework we address the classical problem of the...

The paper aims to find out whether health status determines the level of liquid savings among a pre-retirement (50-60 years old) segment of the Czech population as retrieved from the SHARE (Survey of Health, Aging and Retirement in Europe) database, Wave 5 using a 2SLS methodology. Other...

Financial literacy is gaining increasing importance as a policy objective in many countries. However, internationally comparable information on financial literacy is still scarce. The OECD/INFE survey of adult financial literacy is a standardized survey instrument, but so far has mainly been...

Why are some people wealth rich while others are poor? To what extent can governments affect inequality? Which instruments should they use? Answering these questions requires understanding why people save. Dynamic quantitative models of wealth inequality can help us to understand and quantify...

On average young people "undersave" whereas old people "oversave" with respect to the rational expectations model of life-cycle consumption and savings. According to numerous studies on subjective survival beliefs, young people also "underestimate" whereas old people "overestimate" their...

We use the Italian Survey of Household Income and Wealth, a rather unique dataset with a long time dimension of panel information on consumption, income and wealth, to structurally estimate a buffer-stock saving model. We exploit the information contained in the joint dynamics of income,...

Many nations are seeking to reform their welfare states so that costs to the government can be reduced and the quality of outcomes improved. As a potential way to achieve these aims, there has been a surge of interest in the Singaporean model which features compulsory savings accounts and...

Conventional logic suggests that lowering the policy interest rate will stimulate consumption and investment while discouraging people from saving, but low interest rates may also prompt people to increase their saving to compensate for the low rate of return. Using data on 135 countries from...

Pension economics has traditionally guided pension policy with the help of formal models based on individuals who think in a life cycle context with perfect foresight, full information, and in a time-consistent manner. This paper sheds light on selected aspects of pension economics when these...

This paper develops a theory of the credit cycle to account for recent evidence that capital is increasingly allocated to inefficiently risky projects over the course of the boom. The model features lenders who sell risk exposure to non-lender investors in order to relax borrowing constraints,...

In the 1960s and 1970s Harrod shifted the emphasis of his research in economic dynamics from the study of business cycles (instability principle) to the investigation of the growth process. As part of that, he restated his concept of the natural growth rate as an optimum welfare rate. The...

This paper lays out some of the basic concepts surrounding financial inclusion, including access to banking, digital payments and financial literacy, as well as markets for health insurance, crop insurance, agricultural credit, small firm finance, and microcredit/ microfinance. It goes on to...

It has already been pointed out in the literature on financialisation that private pension funds have played a key role in the inflation of financial markets. This paper argues that an increase in wage dispersion between white-collar and blue-collar workers affects pension funds in a direct and...

In order to secure the retirement some Poles decided to save under the third pillar. This article presents proposals for additional forms of saving for retirement in the form of Employee or Personal Equity Plans proposed in the Strategy for Responsible Development - Capital Construction...

This article is continuation of the authors’ research on financial efficiency evaluation in higher education in the area of didactics in countries that belong to European Union. On the basis of the results of researches, in which a non-parametric approach was used, a classification of member...

The main aim of the study is to identify the size of the pension gap in Poland and to estimate the level of supplementary savings needed to cover it. The issue of pension system income adequacy is first discussed, and the forecasted and targeted levels of replacement rates in Poland are...

This paper looks at household consumption and financial decisions made in a matrilineal society where women are by culture the financial household managers. This culture was strongly altered by the British in the mid-19th century in particular through christian missionaries who proclaimed that...

We use the Italian Survey of Household Income and Wealth, a rather unique dataset with a long time dimension of panel information on consumption, income and wealth, to structurally estimate a buffer-stock saving model. We exploit the information contained in the joint dynamics of income,...

Using representative household survey data, we study the short-term microeconomic effects of the Egyptian revolution on household behaviour in terms of education, health expenditure and savings. We construct a new measure of political instability by analysing the number of fatalities during...

This paper studies consumption and savings decisions of Danish households before and during the financial crisis as well as in the more recent years characterized by negative policy rates. While all household groups decreased their consumption ratios immediately in response to the financial...

This paper examines the role of culture in households' saving decisions. Exploiting the historical language borders within Switzerland, I isolate the effect of households' exposure to certain language groups from economic, institutional, demographic and geographic factors for a homogeneous and...

In this paper, we build a heterogeneous agents-dynamic general equilibrium model wherein saving constraints interact with credit constraints. Saving constraints in the form of fixed costs to use the financial system lead households to seek informal saving instruments (cash) and result in lower...