Book Description

Seminar paper from the year 2007 in the subject Economics - Monetary theory and policy, grade: 1,3, University of Frankfurt (Main) (Fachbereich Wirtschaftswissenschaften), course: Seminar in Household Saving, Borrowing and Portfolio Choice, 7 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: Not long before, most approaches in economics have ignored portfolio decisions of private households. However, some major developments in the last decades have made portfolio decisions more and more important. As a consequence, new academic approaches are replacing simple saving-consumption models making use of an increasing and improving database across countries. Since being a relatively new field of research work, a lot of interesting findings concerning country-specific peculiarities can be achieved by examining international data. Also, by comparing countries, new insights are possible in order to improve the understanding of portfolio decision. In our thesis, we want to do empirical work in order to shed light on some of these questions. Before doing so, we give a brief review and comparison of six different articles which had been the basis of our seminar work. We also try to pick the results comparable to those from our own work in the subsequent chapter as our main part. Here, we analyze data drawn from a special sample of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) for the year 2004 including households aged 50 or over from Spain, Germany and Sweden. We do both descriptive analysis and regression analysis. Of course, these households are a special sample with specific characteristics due to their age. Nevertheless, the general restraint toward risky assets such as stocks in Germany as well as in Spain becomes obvious in the data. The older Swedish households, however, seem to behave similar to their US counterparts. Conducting a probit model indicates, that even after controlling for other potential important characteristics – such as net worth and education – Swedish households tend to be more likely to own risky assets on average than their German or Spanish counterparts. This is fully in line with the findings of one of the article discussed in the literature review that stigmatizes Sweden and the USA as the countries with the highest stock market participation.