D14 - Household Saving; Personal FinanceReturn

This paper investigates the transmission from interest rates to household saving behaviour when introducing two main innovations of analysing this relationship. The first one is based on the use of a set of client interest rates instead of one monetary policy rate. This step enables us to distinguish impacts of the substitution and income effects in more detail. The second major innovation lies in the division of households into income categories, which provides us with more observations and thus makes it possible to conduct this analysis even for a single country. Using the generalized method of moments for the dynamic panel data, we analyse Czech household behaviour for the period 2004-2015. The results highlight that when we ignore details of the transmission channel and use only a monetary policy rate, we lose crucial information about contradictory impacts of the substitution and income effects that are primarily reflected in the client interest rates. This fact may clarify most of the interest rate-savings rate puzzle.

This paper investigates the impact of behavioural attention on the households' foreign currency savings as a response to the external macroeconomic shocks. The information that the households acquire via different communication channels is expected to influence their decisions regarding their savings' allocation into different currencies. This study has applied the fundamental macroeconomic models by including individuals' attention to the specific risks and search interest in specific keywords on Google in order to assess the impact of acquired information and its communication channel on the households' foreign currency savings. We employed a two-level mixed effects model including macroeconomic fundamentals and individuals' attention to the information determinants. We solved a problem of a long list of potential explanatory variables (keywords) by employing the Bayesian Model Averaging. This study assumes that households are more sensitive to the macroeconomic shocks (factors) if they search simultaneously for infor-mation on Google about these factors or specific related risks. The results emphasize the role behavioural attention during financial turmoil and economic downturn periods, especially in the environment of very low interest rates.

The contribution analyzes some life annuity aspects of the pension system (including commercial insurance) in the Czech Republic. In particular, the problem of sustainability, the Generation Life Tables for the pension system and the gender problem for the pensions in the Czech Republic are discussed. Such topics are important for the future of the pension system in the Czech Republic and for the necessary pension reform. Some numerical results with the Czech data concerning these aspects are presented including corresponding conclusions. Economic theory of pensions (see e.g. Sheshinski, 2005 or Uebelmesser, 2004) is not considered here.