Behind the success of dominated personal pension plans: sales force and financial literacy factors

Giuseppe Marotta

Centro Studi di Banca e Finanza (CEFIN) (Center for Studies in Banking and Finance) from Universita di Modena e Reggio Emilia, Dipartimento di Economia "Marco Biagi"

Abstract: The revealed preference for dominated insurance-based personal pension plans in Italy is a decade-long puzzle. I surmise that a motivation from the supply side is a sales force factor deriving from the geographical distribution of financial providers, including the countrywide network of the state controlled Post Office. I provide supporting evidence using three biennial waves of the Bank of Italy’s survey on household finances from 2010 to 2014. The time interval includes a public pension system reform sharply raising the statutory age retirement, legislated in December 2011 to defuse a sovereign debt crisis. I show that the salience effect on the awareness of the benefits of supplementing lower perspective public pensions with personal pension plans strengthened the explanatory power of financial strength indicators. Exploiting a module in the 2010 wave I estimate a surprising decrease in the probability of subscription to personal pension plans in 2014 associated to the indicator for the highest financial literacy level.

Keywords: Pensions; Private pension systems; Retail financial products distribution; Italy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D91 E21 G11 H55 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: pages 42
Date: 2019-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age, nep-eur, nep-fle and nep-mac
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

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Journal Article: Behind the success of dominated personal pension plans: sales force and financial literacy factors (2020)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:mod:wcefin:0077

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