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We study pension planning and financial wealth of natives and immigrants (N=1177) in the Netherlands, in relation to their temporal values (past/future-focused), financial knowledge, IQ, and other individual characteristics. We find that, compared to natives, immigrants are less financially literate and rely more on the government for their retirement income, but are more future-focused and think more about their retirement. Second, controlling for financial knowledge, IQ, saving intention, self-control and demographic factors, temporal values help to predict many aspects of pension planning: how much people think about retirement, their desired retirement age, whether they develop a plan to save for retirement, perceived saving adequacy, and home ownership. Furthermore, temporal values predict savings, risky assets and financial wealth in 2016 and 2020, even after controlling for the financial situation in 2016. Our results have strong implications for policies related to pension communication and contribute to the theory on relationships between economic decisions, time and cognition.

In many countries, pension reforms reduce the generosity of collective pensions and shift the responsibility for an adequate standard of living after retirement to individuals and their households. Individuals have to make more decisions than before on supplementary pension savings, on how to invest their DC pension assets, etc. Making such decisions is challenging, since retirement planning requires intertemporal decision-making under uncertainty and is subject to behavioural and psychological biases. Many studies in different countries have shown that the large majority lack the interest, knowledge, or skills to make such decisions in a way that is in their own best interest. Governments and the pension industry try to assist individuals in making the right decisions through pension communication. This paper focuses on experiences with pension communication, and the lessons to be learned from them. First, the paper provides an overview of the literature, addressing how pension communication is organized across countries and what can be said about its efficiency. Second, using Dutch longitudinal data at the individual level, we analyse the relations between communication (receiving an annual pension overview), pension knowledge, and conscious pension decision-making. We investigate associations and aim at estimating causal effects exploiting the timing of events.

The socio-economic status of Indian Muslims is, on average, considerably lower than that of upper caste Hindus. Muslims have higher fertility and shorter birth spacing and are a minority group that, it has been argued, have poorer access to public goods. They nevertheless exhibit substantially higher child survival rates, and have done for decades. This paper documents and analyses this seeming puzzle. The religion gap in survival is much larger than the gender gap but, in contrast to the gender gap, it has not received much political or academic attention. A decomposition of the survival differential reveals that some compositional effects favour Muslims but that, overall, differences in characteristics between the communities and especially the Muslim deficit in parental education predict a Hindu advantage. Alternative outcomes and specifications support our finding of a Muslim fixed effect that favours survival. The results of this study contribute to a recent literature that debates the importance of socioeconomic status (SES) in determining health and survival. They augment a growing literature on the role of religion or culture as encapsulating important unobservable behaviours or endowments that influence health, indeed, enough to reverse the SES gradient that is commonly observed.

We combine the choice data of proposers and responders in the ultimatum game, their expectations elicited in the form of subjective probability questions, and the choice data of proposers (dictators) in a dictator game to estimate a structural model of decision making under uncertainty. We use a large and representative sample of subjects drawn from the Dutch population. Our results indicate that there is considerable heterogeneity in preferences for equity in the population. Changes in preferences have an important impact on decisions of dictators in the dictator game and responders in the ultimatum game, but a smaller impact on decisions of proposers in the ultimatum game, a result due to proposer's subjective expectations about responders' decisions. The model which uses subjective data on expectations has better predictive power and lower noise level than a model which assumes that players have rational expectations.