NBER Publications by rob j. alessie

Individuals are increasingly put in charge of their financial security after retirement. Moreover, the supply of complex financial products has increased considerably over the years. However, we still have little or no information about whether individuals have the financial knowledge and skills to navigate this new financial environment. To better understand financial literacy and its relation to financial decision-making, we have devised two special modules for the DNB Household Survey. We have designed questions to measure numeracy and basic knowledge related to the working of inflation and interest rates, as well as questions to measure more advanced financial knowledge related to financial market instruments (stocks, bonds, and mutual funds). We evaluate the importance of financial li...

The paper deals with the e.ects of cohabitation of grown children with their parents on household saving, using data from Italy and the Netherlands. It presents a two-period gametheoretical model where the child has to decide whether to move out of the parental home. This decision is affected by transaction costs, the child's preference for independence, and by the consumption loss induced by the move (consumption is a public good while the child lives in the parental home). We show that the child's income share affects the household saving decision, in contrast with predictions of the standard unitary model of household decision making. Empirical results from both countries are supportive of the key model predictions. We find strong positive effects of the child income share on the saving...