Relativistic financial decisions : context effects on retirement saving and investment risk preferences

We report a study of the effects the choice set on financial decision making related to retirement savings and risky investment. The participants were presented with either a full range of choice options or a limited subset of the feasible options. The choices of saving and risk are affected by the position of each option in the range of presented options. This result demonstrated that the range of the options offered as possible saving rates and levels of investment risk influences decisions about saving and risk. The study was conducted on a sample of working people, and we controlled whether the participants can financially afford in their real life the decisions taken in the test. In addition, various measures of risk aversion did not account for the risk taken in each condition. Surprisingly, only the simplest and most direct risk preference measure was a significant predictor of the responses within a particular choice set context, although the actual choices were still very much influenced by the range. Thus, the results reported here suggest that financial judgments and choices are relative, which corroborates, in an important practical domain, previous related work with abstract gambles and hypothetical risky investments

Saving Us From Ourselves – How Can We Make The UK More Financially Resilient?

Untold time and resource has been devoted to quantifying and analysing the UK’s low level of personal saving – and recommending ways to change it for the better. Yet despite the concerted efforts of academics, policymakers, industry and others, the number of people in the UK with few or no savings remains stubbornly high. When we do decide to save, we are prone to making poor decisions about where to put our money

Women and Wealth: Insights for Grantmakers

Improving women's ability to build wealth is not only good for women, but is essential for the economic well-being of children, families, and our community. The women's wealth gap has been largely overlooked in discussions of women's economic security, yet wealth (the value of assets minus debts) is the most comprehensive indicator of financial health.  Our new brief finds the wealth gap to be significant  - during their working years, single women have only 32 cents for every dollar of wealth owned by single men.Women & Wealth: Insights for Grantmakers, the new grantmaker brief from the Asset Funders Network, authored by Mariko Chang, PhD, examines the causes and dimensions of the women's wealth gap and provides recommendations and best practices for grantmakers to reduce the women's wealth gap and improve women's access to the wealth escalator.

Financial knowledge: a literature review examining financial knowledge among male and female high school students

Includes bibliographical references

Medicare Out-of-Pocket Costs: Can Private Savings Incentives Solve the Problem?

Projects the potential savings of low-income workers if they could save part of their income, tax-free and at an interest rate equivalent to that of Treasury bonds, to assess whether such incentives could help them pay for post-retirement health care

Do Health and Longevity Create Wealth?

Health, of course, is vital for productivity and quality of life, and it is understood that as society accumulates more wealth it can provide better health benefits for its people. But health as a driver of the economy is a relatively new concept within scholarly and economics studies. In recent years, many of the foremost schools of economic thought have come to recognize health as a critical driver of the economy

Building wealth: a beginner's guide to securing your financial future

Saving and investment ; Finance, Personal ; Debt management

Brief of Corporate Law Professors as Amici Curie in Support of Respondents

The Supreme Court has looked to the rights of corporate shareholders in determining the rights of union members and non-members to control political spending, and vice versa. The Court sometimes assumes that if shareholders disapprove of corporate political expression, they can easily sell their shares or exercise control over corporate spending. This assumption is mistaken. Because of how capital is saved and invested, most individual shareholders cannot obtain full information about corporate political activities, even after the fact, nor can they prevent their savings from being used to speak in ways with which they disagree. Individual shareholders have no “opt out” rights or practical ability to avoid subsidizing corporate political expression with which they disagree. Nor do individuals have the practical option to refrain from putting their savings into equity investments, as doing so would impose damaging economic penalties and ignore conventional financial guidance for individual investors

How to Have a Successful Retirement

What is retirement? Retirement is the years that an individual is able to enjoy after spending a majority of their life devoted to their career. A successful retirement is not a birthright; it is something that an individual must earn through hard work and proper planning. This paper identifies ten important commandments that are both necessary and helpful in achieving a successful retirement