We evaluate, using a randomized trial, two school-based financial literacy education programs in government-run primary and junior high schools in Ghana. One program integrated financial and social education, whereas the second program only offered financial education. Both programs included a voluntary after-school savings club that provided students with a locked money box. After nine months, both programs had significant impacts on savings behavior relative to the control group, mostly because children moved savings from home to school. We observed few other impacts. We do find that financial education, when not accompanied by social education, led children to work more compared to the control group, whereas no such effect is found for the integrated curriculum; however, the difference between the two treatment effects on child labor is not statistically significant.
We evaluate, using a randomized trial, two school-based financial literacy education programs in government-run primary and junior high schools in Ghana. One program integrated financial and social education, whereas the second program only offered financial education. Both programs included a voluntary after-school savings club that provided students with a locked money box. After nine months, both programs had significant impacts on savings behavior relative to the control group, mostly because children moved savings from home to school. We observed few other impacts. We do find that financial education, when not accompanied by social education, led children to work more compared to the control group, whereas no such effect is found for the integrated curriculum; however, the difference between the two treatment effects on child labor is not statistically significant.
Die Autoren setzen sich mit Reformoptionen der kapitalgedeckten Altersvorsorge auseinander. Ausgehend von der politischen Diskussion um die aktuelle Verfassung der Alterssicherung in Deutschland geht der Beitrag auf Kritikpunkte an der kapitalgedeckten Altersvorsorge – insbesondere der Riester-Rente – ein. Drei der daraus abgeleiteten Reformvorschläge, die der Kategorie "Ersatz des Bestehenden" zugeordnet werden können, werden einer kritischen Analyse unterzogen. Im Einzelnen werden untersucht: (1) die Rückkehr zum Status quo vor den Riester-Reformen, (2) die Etablierung einer "staatlichen Konkurrenz" für die Anbieter kapitalgedeckter Vorsorge in Form von (a) freiwilligen Zusatzbeiträgen zur umlagefinanzierten gesetzlichen Rentenversicherung, (b) staatlich administrierten, kapitalgedeckten Vorsorgekonten. Dabei wird gezeigt, dass alle drei Reformvorschläge bei nüchterner Betrachtung gravierende Nachteile in sich tragen. Zum Schluss werden Alternativenaufgezeigt, die das bestehende System weiterentwickeln und verbessern könnten. ; The authors reflect on reform options concerning the funded old age provision. Starting from the political debate on the current state of the German old age security system they sum up the critique concerning the funded old age provision especially the Riester-pension. Three reform options that may replace the existing Riester-pension, are analyzed in detail: (1) the return to the status quo before the Riester-reforms, (2) the introduction of a "public competitor" to the providers of private pensions in the form of (a) voluntary contributions to the pay-as-you-go-financed public pension scheme, (b) funded pension accounts managed by a public non-profit organization. It is shown, that these options have severe disadvantages compared to the current pension policy. Finally alternatives are presented, that could improve ourpension system.
We document the presence of sizable distributional effects from unexpected price level movements in the Euro Area (EA) using sectoral accounts and newly available data from the Household Finance and Consumption Survey. The EA as a whole is a net winner of unexpected price level increases, with Italy, Greece, Portugal and Spain being the biggest beneficiaries, and Belgium and Malta being the largest losers. Governments are net winners of inflation, while the household (HH) sector is a net loser in the EA as a whole. HHs in Belgium, Ireland, Malta and Germany incur the biggest per capita losses, while HHs in Finland and Spain turn out to be net winners of inflation. Considerable heterogeneity exists also within the HH sector: relatively young middle class HHs are net winners of inflation, while older and richer HHs are losers. As a result, wealth inequality in the EA decreases with unexpected inflation, although in some countries (Austria, Germany and Malta) inequality increases due to presence of relatively few young borrowing HHs. We document that HHs inflation exposure varies systematically across countries, with HHs in high inflation EA countries holding systematically lower nominal exposures.
Für Aktionäre waren bis zur Einführung der Abgeltungssteuer am 1.1.2009 Ausschüttungen in Form von Aktienrückkäufen aus steuerlichen Erwägungen in Deutschland gegenüber Dividenden vorteilhaft. Bei einem Aktienrückkauf wurde innerhalb der Spekulationsfrist nur ein realisierter Kursgewinn besteuert und nach einer Haltedauer von einem Jahr konnte der Gewinn aus einem Aktienrückkauf vollständig steuerfrei vereinnahmt werden, während Dividenden in vollem Umfang besteuert wurden. Nach der Einführung der Abgeltungssteuer und der Abschaffung der Spekulationsfrist werden Kapitalerträge in Deutschland gleichartig besteuert. Um die vorteilhafteste Ausschüttungsform für Aktionäre im derzeit gültigen deutschen Steuersystem zu identifizieren, werden in diesem Aufsatz die Vermögenspositionen von Aktionären analysiert, die Ausschüttungen entweder in Form von Aktienrückkäufen oder Dividenden erhalten. Dabei stellt sich heraus, dass sich auch unter der Abgeltungssteuer ein Aktienrückkauf im Vergleich zu einer Dividende vorteilhaft auf die Vermögensposition der Aktionäre auswirkt. Die Abschätzung der quantitativen Bedeutung dieses Vorteils erfolgt insbesondere unter Rückgriff auf numerische Berechnungen. ; Since January 1, 2009 capital gains are taxable with a flat tax rate in Germany regardless of the investor's holding period. Prior to that point of time stock owners preferred profit distributions by share repurchase instead of a dividend due to the fact that a share repurchase could be collected tax-free when the stock was held for a period longer than one year. To find out which distribution alternative is preferred by stock owners in the current German tax system this paper examines the wealth of stock owners when a firm distributes earnings by dividend or share repurchase instead. The results suggest that firms should always distribute earnings by share repurchase. Numerical calculations illustrate the results of the analysis.
The U.S. mortgage market has experienced phenomenal change over the last 35 years. Most observers believe that the deregulation of the banking industry and financial markets generally has played an important part in this transformation. One issue that has received particular attention is the role that the housing Government Sponsored Enterprises (GSEs), Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, have played in the development of a secondary market in mortgages. This paper develops and implements a technique for assessing the impact of changes in the mortgage market on individuals and households. Our analysis is based on an implication of the permanent income hypothesis: that the higher a household's future income, the more it desires to spend and consume, ceteris paribus. If we have perfect credit markets, then desired consumption matches actual consumption and current spending on housing should forecast future income. Since credit market imperfections mute this effect, we can view the strength of the relationship between housing spending and future income as a measure of the imperfectness" of mortgage markets. Thus, a natural way to determine whether mortgage market developments have actually helped households by decreasing market imperfections is to see whether this link has strengthened over time. We implement this framework using panel data going back to 1969. We find that over the past several decades, housing markets have become less imperfect in the sense that households are now more able to buy homes whose values are consistent with their long-term income prospects. However, we find no evidence that the GSEs' activities have contributed to this phenomenon. This is true whether we look at all homebuyers, or at subsamples of the population whom we might expect to benefit particularly from GSE activity, such as low-income households and first-time homebuyers.
The countercyclical pattern of saving in Thailand in the 1990s and 2000s challenged the prediction of permanent income theory and raised questions about household saving behaviors in the country. Using constructed pseudo-panel data sets from the Thai Household Socioeconomic Surveys from 1992 to 2011, this paper estimates the intensity of the precautionary saving motive, measured by the coefficient of relative prudence of households in Thailand. By using a dynamic pseudo-panel approach to address concerns with regard to individual heterogeneity causing bias in estimation, the estimated relative prudence of Thai households is around 2, which shows a low precautionary saving motive among these households compared to other countries. Estimates based on disaggregation by demographic characteristics show that as a result of the government-assistance policy, older cohorts and those who live in the rural areas show lower prudence. However, female heads of households and those with a high education level exhibit high prudence, indicating the high income uncertainty faced by these groups in the economy.
Individuals with assets in the millions of euros have been underrepresented in population surveys and accordingly little has been known about them. As a result, the full extent of wealth concentration in Germany was unknown. To close the existing data gap, the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) inte- grated a special sample in which individuals with high assets are overrepresented. New calculations using this data and a national rich list show that the concentration of individual net assets in Germany is higher than previously thought. The top ten percent possess over two thirds of all individual net assets, while previously it was thought to only be 59 percent. The richest percent of the population has around 35 percent of the wealth, not 22 percent as previously thought. Around 1.5 per- cent of adults in Germany have assets in the amount of at least one million euros. These individuals do not only differ from the rest of the population in terms of wealth: They are also more often older men, more highly educated, self-employed, and more satisfied with their lives. The government could encourage wealth accumulation in the lower half of the distribution in various ways, such as in the form of individual savings accounts into which the state also pays.
This paper studies the determinants of being unbanked in the euro area and the United States as well as the effects of being unbanked on wealth accumulation. Based on household-level data from the euro area Household Finance and Consumption Survey and the U.S. Survey of Consumer Finance, it first documents that there are, respectively, 3.6% and 7.5% of unbanked households in the two economies. Low-income households, unemployed households and those with a poor education are the most likely to be affected, and remarkably more so in the United States than in the euro area. At the same time, there is a role for government policies in fostering financial inclusion. Using a propensity score matching approach to estimate the effects of being unbanked, it is found that banked households report substantially higher net wealth than their unbanked counterparts, with a gap of around €74,000 for the euro area and $42,000 for the United States. A potential reason for this wealth difference is that banked households are considerably more likely to accumulate wealth via ownership of their main residence.
This study combines novel financial-literacy data with measures of attitudes to redistribution from the British Election Study. We find a significant negative relationship between financial literacy and attitudes in favour of government intervention for income redistribution. The effect is robust to several specifications, samples, longitudinal models and instrumental variable regressions. Falsification tests show that these results are independent of generic attitudes towards other types of inequality/discrimination, e.g. based on gender, race or sexual orientation. An inquiry into the mechanisms of the effect indicates that the homo oeconomicus effect does not exert an impact on attitudes to redistribution for the less financially literate.
This paper studies the first nationwide introduction of automatic enrolment, in which employers in the United Kingdom are obliged to enrol employees into a workplace pension scheme, which employees can then choose to leave if they wish. We exploit the phased rollout of automatic enrolment since 2012 to estimate its effect on pension saving. As a result of automatic enrolment, participation in workplace pensions among eligible private sector workers is estimated to have increased by 37 percentage points, and workplace pension membership reached 88% amongst those affected by April 2015. Automatic enrolment significantly increased the average pension contribution rate, in part because some newlyenrolled employees received an employer contribution well above the minimum mandated by the government. Furthermore, many employees who did not have to be automatically enrolled were nonetheless brought into a workplace pension scheme as a result of the policy. We find no evidence of employers reducing employer contributions for newly-hired employees or existing members of workplace pensions.
We show that unexpected price level movements generate sizable wealth redistribution in the Euro Area (EA), using sectoral accounts and newly available data from the Household Finance and Consumption Survey. The EA as a whole is a net loser of unexpected price level decreases, with Italy, Greece, Portugal and Spain losing most in per capita terms, and Belgium and Malta being net winners. Governments are net losers of deflation, while the household (HH) sector is a net winner in the EA as a whole. HHs in Belgium, Ireland, Malta and Germany experience the biggest per capita gains, while HHs in Finland and Spain turn out to be net losers. Considerable heterogeneity exists also within the HH sector: relatively young middle class HHs are net losers of deflation, while older and richer HHs are winners. As a result, wealth inequality in the EA increases with unexpected deflation, although in some countries (Austria, Germany and Malta) inequality decreases due to the presence of relatively few young borrowing HHs. We document that HHs inflation exposure varies systematically across countries, with HHs in high inflation EA countries holding systematically lower nominal exposures.
Legen Menschen ihre Ersparnisse in Finanzprodukte an, etwa um für ihr Alter vorzusorgen, machen sie davon in nicht unerheblichem Ausmaß ihre künftige finanzielle Lebenslage abhängig. Die Finanzbranche bewirbt zahlreiche und hinsichtlich ihres Verlustrisikos stark variierende Anlagemöglichkeiten - von der klassischen privaten Rentenversicherung bis hin zum hochriskanten Aktienfonds. Um die Anleger bei der Auswahl eines für sie geeigneten Produkts zu unterstützen und vor finanziellen Schäden zu bewahren, hat die Politik standardisierte und verständliche Produktinformationsblätter und Beratungsprotokolle vorgeschrieben. Doch reicht das aus? Damit Anleger ihr Geld nicht fehlinvestieren, benötigen sie nämlich auch ausreichende Kenntnisse bei Finanzthemen, die es ihnen beispielsweise erlauben, die Wirkungen des Zinseszinses und das Verlustrisiko einer Anlage korrekt einzuschätzen. An dieser Stelle scheint es zu hapern, wie die Ergebnisse eines Verhaltensexperiments des DIW Berlin in Kooperation mit der Humboldt-Universität Berlin vermuten lassen: Die ausgewählten Teilnehmer haben den Zinseszinseffekt mehrheitlich missverstanden - und das Anlagerisiko folglich massiv unterschätzt. ; People are investing their life savings in financial products, for instance, to provide for their retirement, and in doing so they are making their future financial situation almost entirely dependent on the success of these investments. The financial sector promotes numerous investment opportunities with widely varying levels of risk - from the classic private pension insurance to high-risk equity funds. To assist investors in selecting a product suitable for them and to safeguard against financial losses, policy-makers have prescribed standardized and comprehensible product leaflets and consulting protocols. But is that enough? In order to prevent investors from making poor investment decisions, they also need sufficient knowledge of the financial issues, which, for example, allow them to accurately assess the effects of compound interest on an investment and the risk of loss. This seems to be the problem area, as indicated by the results of a behavioral experiment conducted by DIW Berlin in cooperation with Humboldt-University Berlin: most of the participants chosen misunderstood the effect of compound interest - and therefore seriously underestimated the investment risk.
Mit der Einführung der Abgeltungsteuer zum 1. Januar 2009 hat sich die Besteuerung von Einkünften aus Kapitalbeteiligungen in Deutschland grundlegend verändert. In diesem Beitrag wird analysiert, welche Auswirkungen der Steuersystemwechsel vom Halbeinkünfteverfahren zur Abgeltungssteuer auf die Ausschüttungspolitik von Unternehmen hat. Zu diesem Zweck werden die Vermögenspositionen von Aktionären eines Unternehmens betrachtet, welches liquide Mittel entweder in Form einer Dividende oder in Form eines Aktienrückkaufes ausschüttet, oder diese Mittel alternativ für eine Investition einbehält. Auf der Grundlage dieser Vermögenspositionen werden anschließend für beide Steuersysteme die kritischen Werte für die Rendite einer zusätzlichen Investition bei Einbehaltung abgeleitet und miteinander verglichen. Dabei stellt sich heraus, dass nach dem Steuersystemwechsel Unternehmen im Interesse des Großteils ihrer Aktionäre auf Investitionsprojekte verzichten sollten, die das Vermögen der Aktionäre unter dem Halbeinkünfteverfahren noch gesteigert haben. Anstatt in diese Projekte zu investieren ist den Unternehmen heute angeraten diese Mittel auszuschütten. ; Since January 1, 2009 capital gains on equity participations are taxable with a flat tax rate in Germany. This paper examines the impact of the tax system change on the payout policy of corporations. For this purpose the shareholder wealth is examined if the corporation pays out free cash in the form of a dividend or share repurchase or alternatively retains the funds for a company-internal investment. The results suggest that in the interest of most of its shareholders corporations should no longer invest in all projects that were beneficial under the previous tax system. Instead the corporations should pay out these funds.
The article presents the outcomes of dynamic, cross-section analysis of the differences in the level and structure of household indebtedness in EU countries and the range of problems with debt service between 2005 and 2009. Statistical data from of the EU Commission, obtained in the periodic research of people's incomes and living conditions (EU-SILC) and the ECRI - European Credit Research Institute, was used in the research, as well as the method of multi-dimensional analysis (cluster analysis and k-means method), enabling to classify EU households according to the features of their indebtedness. Moreover, in order to define the quantitative relationships between the level and structure of households' indebtedness and the frequency of repayment problems, tools such as correlation analysis and stepwise regression, enabling the description of its strength and direction of influence of selected variables on repayment problems.
