January 2018

The Retirement Survival Guide: How to Make Smart Financial Decisions in Good Times and Bad

By Julie Jason Given today’s dire headlines, planning a secure retirement has become a more critical task than ever. This revised edition of Julie Jason’s award-winning guide—updated to reflect current laws and statistics—will help Americans seeking safety and stability in a time of economic change. In addition to showing those on the verge of retirement how to create their own “personal pension,” investment educator Jason deftly guides prospective retirees through the otherwise bewildering process of evaluating their needs, anticipating future...

The Devil You Know: A Survey Examining How Retail Investors Seek Out and Use Financial Information and Investment Advice

By Christine Sgarlata Chung (Albany Law School) Everyday, people across the United States make decisions that will affect their financial futures — e.g., borrowing money to buy a house, go to college, or start a business; investing in the stock market to save for retirement; using check cashing services or payday lenders rather than accounts at banks or credit unions for day-to-day banking needs, and the like. Traditional tenets of financial economics and investment theory assume that people make fully...

Nudging Financial and Demographic Literacy: Experimental Evidence from an Italian Trade Union Pension Fund

By Francesco C. Billari (Bocconi University - Department of Policy Analysis and Public Management), Carlo A. Favero (Bocconi University - Department of Finance; Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR)) & Francesco Saita (Bocconi University - Department of Finance) In this article, we present and test experimentally a low-cost, Internet-based, financial literacy program that we designed for implementation with the largest industrial pension fund in Italy. The program, Finlife (Financial Education and Planning for a Long Life) included 1) an instructional...

Are Cryptocurrencies Real Financial Bubbles? Evidence from Quantitative Analyses

By Marco Bianchetti (Intesa Sanpaolo - Financial and Market Risk Management; University of Bologna), Camilla Ricci (Intesa Sanpaolo-Financial and Market Risk Management) & Marco Scaringi (Intesa Sanpaolo - Financial and Market Risk Management) The growth of peer-to-peer exchanges and the blockchain technology has led to a proliferation of cryptocurrencies and to a massive increase in the number of investors who actually negotiate digital money. Cryptocurrencies trade at prices which is mainly driven by investor sentiment, becoming a potential source of...

December 2017

Man Vs Money: Everyday Economics Explained

By Stewart Cowley Economics expert Stewart Cowley distils the complexities of modern-day money and our relationship with it, explaining how you can use economics to your advantage and that understanding economics can improve your life. Along the way you will discover how the statistics that govern our world are based on guesswork, why stock markets are like a wandering drunken man, what you need to live like a millionaire, and why cooking has made man the dominant species on the planet. Where...

The Household Savings Paradox

By Tobias Meyll (University of Giessen - Department of Financial Services), Thomas Pauls (Goethe University Frankfurt) & Andreas Walter (University of Giessen - Department of Financial Service) Using representative data from Germany, we reveal that more than 27.3% of the population not only restrains from participating in the stock market but also refuse to invest in contractual savings and retirement products. In fact, we find that these households rely on deposits only - an investment strategy usually related to negligible...

Comparison of Psychosocial Factors Affecting the Demands for Pension Plans Between American and Chinese Residents

By Ruiqi Tian (Southwest Jiao Tong University - Psychological Research and Counseling Center) & Ruilin Tian (North Dakota State University - Department of Accounting, Finance, and Information Systems) Pension becomes more and more important as people are living longer and pursuing higher living quality after retirement. This paper is to analyze the psychosocial factors that affect people’s pension demands in the US as well as in China. As two representative countries that have different pension systems, cultures, value systems, family...

Behavioral Impediments to Valuing Annuities: Evidence on the Effects of Complexity and Choice Bracketing

By Jeffrey R. Brown, Arie Kapteyn, Erzo F.P. Luttmer, Olivia S. Mitchell & Anya Samek This paper examines two behavioral factors that diminish people’s ability to value a lifetime income stream or annuity, drawing on a survey of about 4,000 adults in a U.S. nationally representative sample. Our first main finding is that experimentally increasing the complexity of the annuity choice reduces respondents’ ability to value the annuity. We measure lack of ability to value an annuity by the difference...

The Power of Percentage: Quantitative Framing of Pension Income

By Henriette M. Prast (Tiburg University) & Federica Teppa (De Nederlandsche Bank) We investigate whether the quantitative frame used to communicate future pension income to plan members matters for perceived pension income adequacy. We allocate plan members randomly to one of four pension income framing conditions: annual pension income, monthly pension income, pension income as percentage of current income, pension income as decimal of current income. We find that expressing projected pension income as a percentage (decimal) of current income...

The Facts of Women's Labor Behavior in the Field of Education

By Spankulova Seitkazievna (Narxoz University) In the article the labor behavior of women in education in post-Soviet countries is analyzed. model of employment of women (men as well), which was formed in Soviet years, has not undergone significant changes during the years of economic reforms. Expanding the accessibility of formal social security programs to the elderly has changed the behavior of this population in the labor market. Women do not receive social old-age pensions in the same amount as men,...