IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/wil/wileco/2008-13.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Effect of Marital Status and Children on Savings and Portfolio Choice

Author

Abstract

This paper investigates the impact of demographic shocks on optimal decisions about saving, life insurance, and, most centrally, asset allocation. We analyze these choices within the framework of a life-cycle model that features exogenous changes in family composition, heterogeneity in lifetime income, and uninsurable fluctuations in earnings and medical costs. Our analysis indicates that marital-status transitions and children can have important effects on optimal household decisions. Widowhood induces sharp reductions in the portfolio shares in stock, and the impact is largest for women and individuals with children. Divorce causes men and women to reallocate their portfolios in different directions; men choose much riskier allocations, while women opt for safer ones. Children play a fundamental role in the optimal portfolio decisions. Men with children, for example, increase their shares in response to divorce by less than half as much as men without children. Comparing our simulation results with panel-data evidence on stockholding from the PSID and the HRS, we conclude that changes in marital status and children matter empirically as well, but not always in the ways that the model predicts.

Suggested Citation

  • David Love, 2008. "The Effect of Marital Status and Children on Savings and Portfolio Choice," Department of Economics Working Papers 2008-13, Department of Economics, Williams College.
  • Handle: RePEc:wil:wileco:2008-13
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://web.williams.edu/Economics/wp/lovemarital2008.pdf
    File Function: Full text
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Hyeng Keun Koo, 1998. "Consumption and Portfolio Selection with Labor Income: A Continuous Time Approach," Mathematical Finance, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 8(1), pages 49-65, January.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Letendre, Marc-Andre & Smith, Gregor W., 2001. "Precautionary saving and portfolio allocation: DP by GMM," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 48(1), pages 197-215, August.
    2. Miao, Jianjun & Wang, Neng, 2007. "Investment, consumption, and hedging under incomplete markets," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 86(3), pages 608-642, December.
    3. Christoph Belak & An Chen & Carla Mereu & Robert Stelzer, 2014. "Optimal investment with time-varying stochastic endowments," Papers 1406.6245, arXiv.org, revised Feb 2022.
    4. Roche, Hervé & Tompaidis, Stathis & Yang, Chunyu, 2013. "Why does junior put all his eggs in one basket? A potential rational explanation for holding concentrated portfolios," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 109(3), pages 775-796.
    5. Kamma, Thijs & Pelsser, Antoon, 2022. "Near-optimal asset allocation in financial markets with trading constraints," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 297(2), pages 766-781.
    6. Bayraktar, Erhan & Young, Virginia R., 2007. "Minimizing the probability of lifetime ruin under borrowing constraints," Insurance: Mathematics and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 41(1), pages 196-221, July.
    7. Josa-Fombellida, Ricardo & Navas, Jorge, 2020. "Time consistent pension funding in a defined benefit pension plan with non-constant discounting," Insurance: Mathematics and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 94(C), pages 142-153.
    8. Matheus R Grasselli & Sebastiano Silla, 2009. "A policyholder's utility indifference valuation model for the guaranteed annuity option," Papers 0908.3196, arXiv.org.
    9. Carolina Achury & Sylwia Hubar & Christos Koulovatianos, 2012. "Saving Rates and Portfolio Choice with Subsistence Consumption," Review of Economic Dynamics, Elsevier for the Society for Economic Dynamics, vol. 15(1), pages 108-126, January.
    10. Milevsky, Moshe A. & Young, Virginia R., 2007. "Annuitization and asset allocation," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 31(9), pages 3138-3177, September.
    11. Schwartz, Eduardo S & Tebaldi, Claudio, 2004. "Illiquid Assets and Optimal Portfolio Choice," University of California at Los Angeles, Anderson Graduate School of Management qt7q65t12x, Anderson Graduate School of Management, UCLA.
    12. Lin, Wen-chang & Lu, Jin-ray, 2012. "Risky asset allocation and consumption rule in the presence of background risk and insurance markets," Insurance: Mathematics and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 50(1), pages 150-158.
    13. Kiryoung Lee & Yoontae Jeon & Insik Kim, 2021. "Which economic uncertainty measure matters for households' portfolio decision?," Journal of Financial Research, Southern Finance Association;Southwestern Finance Association, vol. 44(2), pages 343-369, June.
    14. Huang, Huaxiong & Milevsky, Moshe A., 2008. "Portfolio choice and mortality-contingent claims: The general HARA case," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 32(11), pages 2444-2452, November.
    15. van den Bremer, Ton & van der Ploeg, Frederick & Wills, Samuel, 2016. "The Elephant In The Ground: Managing Oil And Sovereign Wealth," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 82(C), pages 113-131.
    16. Dejanir Silva & Robert Townsend, 2018. "Risk-taking over the Life Cycle: Aggregate and Distributive Implications of Entrepreneurial Risk," 2018 Meeting Papers 1318, Society for Economic Dynamics.
    17. Francisco Gomes & Alexander Michaelides, 2003. "Portfolio Choice With Internal Habit Formation: A Life-Cycle Model With Uninsurable Labor Income Risk," Review of Economic Dynamics, Elsevier for the Society for Economic Dynamics, vol. 6(4), pages 729-766, October.
    18. Zhiping Chen & Liyuan Wang & Ping Chen & Haixiang Yao, 2019. "Continuous-Time Mean–Variance Optimization For Defined Contribution Pension Funds With Regime-Switching," International Journal of Theoretical and Applied Finance (IJTAF), World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd., vol. 22(06), pages 1-33, September.
    19. Masoud Rahiminezhad Galankashi & Farimah Mokhatab Rafiei & Maryam Ghezelbash, 2020. "Portfolio selection: a fuzzy-ANP approach," Financial Innovation, Springer;Southwestern University of Finance and Economics, vol. 6(1), pages 1-34, December.
    20. Penaranda, Francisco, 2007. "Portfolio choice beyond the traditional approach," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 24481, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Portfolio choice; mortality risk; marital status; precautionary saving; be- quests; risk and uncertainty.;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • G11 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Portfolio Choice; Investment Decisions
    • G22 - Financial Economics - - Financial Institutions and Services - - - Insurance; Insurance Companies; Actuarial Studies
    • D91 - Microeconomics - - Micro-Based Behavioral Economics - - - Role and Effects of Psychological, Emotional, Social, and Cognitive Factors on Decision Making
    • E21 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Consumption, Saving, Production, Employment, and Investment - - - Consumption; Saving; Wealth
    • I10 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - General
    • J12 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Marriage; Marital Dissolution; Family Structure

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:wil:wileco:2008-13. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Greg Phelan (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/edwilus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.