TY  - JOUR
AU  - Kapteyn,Arie
AU  - Panis,Constantijn
TI  - The Size and Composition of Wealth Holdings in the United States, Italy, and the Netherlands
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 10182
PY  - 2003
Y2  - December 2003
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w10182
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w10182.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Arie Kapteyn
RAND Corporation
1776 Main Street
P.O. Box 2138
Santa Monica, CA  90407-2138
Tel: (310) 393-0411 x 7973
E-Mail: arie_kapteyn@rand.org

Constantijn Panis
Advanced Analytical Consulting Group
100 California Street, Suite 1125
San Francisco, CA 94111
Tel: 310.866.2650
E-Mail: stanpanis@aacg.com
AB  - This paper analyzes retirement saving and portfolio choice in the United States, Italy, and the Netherlands. While these countries enjoy roughly the same standard of living, they vary widely in their institutional organization of retirement income provisions. Building on extensions of the life cycle model, we derive hypotheses on the implications of institutional differences for wealth accumulation and portfolio composition. Examples of implications are that the ratio of net worth and gross wealth should be highest in Italy, that Dutch households should hold the lowest wealth levels at retirement and that the ownership of risky assets should be highest in the U.S. We investigate these and other hypotheses at both the macro and micro level and find that the data are generally consistent with the hypotheses.
ER  -