We estimate the effect of pension reforms on households' expectations of retirement outcomes and private wealth accumulation decisions exploiting a decade of intense Italian pension reforms as a source of exogenous variation in expected pension wealth. The Survey of Household Income and Wealth, a large random sample of the Italian population, elicits expectations of the age at which workers exp...

We study the distributional consequences of housing price, bond price and equity price increases for Euro Area households using data from the Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS). The capital gains from bond price and equity price increases turn out to be concentrated among relatively few households, while the median household strongly benefits from housing price increases. The capit...

investments in the extension of health insurance coverage, the strengthening of public health services, as well as primary care and better hospitals, highlights the emerging role of healthcare as part of china’s new growth regime, based on an expansion of services, and redistributive policies. such investments, apart from their central role in terms of relief for low-income people, serve to reb...

We estimate the effect of pension reforms on households’ expectations of retirement outcomes and wealth accumulation decisions exploiting a decade of pension reforms as a source of exogenous variation in expected pension wealth. Two parameters are crucial to estimate pension wealth: the age at which workers expect to retire and the expected ratio of pension benefits to pre-retirement income. Th...

the main logic behind the demand for life insurance is to hedge against the labor income uncertainty due to premature death of a wage earner. in other words, life insurance is the device by which this labor income uncertainty is handled. for insurers, the uncertainty arises from the lack of knowledge about the age of death of the wage earner. this paper attempts to derive life insurance demand ...

BACKGROUND There are growing concerns regarding inequities in health, with poverty being an important determinant of health as well as a product of health status. Within the People's Republic of China (P.R. China), disparities in socio-economic position are apparent, with the rural-urban gap of particular concern. Our aim was to compare direct and proxy methods of estimating household wealth in...

I study the effects of long-run inflation and income taxation in an economy where households face uninsurable idiosyncratic risks. I construct a tractable competitive search framework that generates dispersion of prices, income and wealth. I analytically characterize the stationary equilibrium and the policy effects on individual choices. Quantitative analysis finds that monetary and fiscal pol...

1.1 The question how much income inequality is acceptable All modern nations engage in active income redistribution and have a system that taxes the wealthy to a greater extent than the poor. Redistributive policies are accompanied by a continuous discussion on the question of how much income inequality is justified (e.g. Pen and Tinbergen, 1977; Sen, 1997). This discussion has an important ide...

Housing wealth constitutes most of the non-pension wealth of the elderly population. This study analyzes the potential of reverse mortgages to increase the income and liquid wealth of the elderly by identifying households with relatively high levels of housing equity. Because this article looks at the whole distribution of elderly households and considers debt as well as income, it finds a larg...

Drawing in large part on the 1995 Survey of Consumer Finances, the authors describe the pattern of charitable giving by families at the upper reaches of income and wealth, as well as across the income spectrum. The overriding empirical motif is that the distribution of charitable giving is more highly skewed toward the upper end of the financial spectrum than previously documented, and that the...