Risky Asset Ownership Decisions by the Elderly in the UK: Evidence from the Retirement Survey

In this paper we shed more light on the portfolio behaviour of the older part of the UK population over the period 1988-94. We employ data from the Retirement Survey and different econometric specifications in order to model the risky asset ownership decisions over time. The unique nature of the dataset allows us to control for a variety of factors that may be important for the portfolio behaviour of people that are about to or they have recently retired. Our results are indicative for the role of the fixed participation costs and inertial behaviour in risky asset ownership decisions.household portfolios, risky asset ownership decisions, random effects probit, bivariate probit, transition rates