Börsch-Supan, Axel (Institut für Volkswirtschaft und Statistik (IVS))
Abstract
Household saving is still little understood, and even the basic facts for instance: How does saving change over the life cycle? Do the elderly draw down their wealth? are controversial. Understanding saving behaviour is not only an important question because the division of income in consumption and saving concerns one of the most fundamental household decisions, but it is also of utmost policy relevance since private household saving as a private insurance interacts with social policy as public insurance. Population ageing and its threat to the sustainability of the public insurance systems has put the spotlight back on own saving as a device for old-age provision. Solving the pension crises therefore requires understanding saving. This special issue of Research in Economics is devoted to a further step in this direction. It presents a first stock taking of the International Savings Comparison Project a project performed under the auspices of a European Union sponsored network of researchers. The main focus of this project is the interaction of household saving with public policy, notably the generosity and design of public pension systems. It is very much in the tradition of Feldstein’s (1974) seminal study, but we transpose the inference from time series data to a set of international panel data.
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Paper provided by Institut für Volkswirtschaft und Statistik (IVS), University of Mannheim in its series IVS discussion paper series with number
595.
Length: Date of creation: Date of revision: Handle: RePEc:mea:ivswpa:595
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