As financial markets grow ever more complex and integrated, households must make increasingly sophisticated and all-too-often irreversible economic decisions. This is particularly evident in retirement decision-making. Traditional defined benefit pension schemes are being replaced with defined contribution pensions; employer and government judgment regarding how much to save and where to invest has been replaced by employees having to make these choices on their own (sometimes assisted by advisers); and retirees have become responsible for managing their own pension assets.
This volume explores how financial literacy can enhance peoples' ability to make informed economic choices. It proposes that financial literacy determines how well people make and execute saving, investing, borrowing, and planning decisions. It examines causality using controlled settings to disentangle whether financial literacy causes saving or vice versa, and demonstrates that financial education programs do indeed enhance financial decision-making and asset accumulation.

Around the world, people nearing and entering retirement are holding ever-greater levels of debt than in the past. This is not a benign situation, as many pre-retirees and retirees are stressed about their indebtedness. Moreover, this growth in debt among the older population may render retirees vulnerable to financial shocks, medical care bills, and changes in interest rates. Contributors to this volume explore key aspects of the rise in debt across older cohorts, drill down into the types of debt and reasons for debt incurred by the older population, and review policies to remedy some of the financial problems facing older persons, in the US and elsewhere. The authors explore which groups are most affected by debt and identify the factors producing this important increase in leverage at older ages. It is clear that the economic and market environment is influential when it comes to saving and debt. Access to easy borrowing, low interest rates, and the rising cost of education have had significant impacts on how much people borrow, and how much debt they carry at older ages. In this environment, the capacity to manage debt is ever more important as older workers lack the opportunity to recover from mistakes.

Overcoming Barriers to Entrepreneurship compiles academic discussions of real and perceived barriers to the founding and running of small businesses in America. Each chapter illustrates how policy and economic environment can hinder business owners, and suggests what can be done to help them. Starting with venture capital access in Silicon Valley during the Internet bubble, the book goes on to question the link between personal wealth and entrepreneurship, to investigate how federal tax rates effect small-business creation and destruction, to explain the low rate of self-employment among Mexican immigrants, and to suggest how pension coverage can be increased in small businesses. Concluding with an attempt to qualify what makes an entrepreneur, Overcoming Barriers to Entrepreneurship argues that policymakers need not create incentives for entrepreneurs to create new businesses, though there is a great deal they can do to encourage entrepreneurs by removing legal and economic roadblocks to business creation.

The great majority of working Americans are unprepared to face the difficult task of planning for retirement. In fact, the personal savings rate has been holding steady at zero for several years, down from 8 percent in the mid-1980s. "Overcoming the Saving Slump "explores the many challenges facing workers in the transition from a traditional defined benefit pension system to one that requires more individual responsibility, analyzing the considerable impediments to saving and evaluating financial literacy programs devised by employers and the government. Mapping the changing landscape of pensions and the rise of defined contribution plans, Annamaria Lusardi and others investigate new methods for stimulating saving and promoting financial education drawing on the experience of the United States as well as countries that have privatized their welfare systems, including Sweden and Chile. This timely volume pinpoints where human resources departments, the financial industry, and government officials have succeeded--or failed--in bridging the way to a new retirement system. As the workforce ages and more pensions disappear each second, Lusardi's findings will be invaluable for economists and anyone facing retirement.