Household savings in CESEE: expectations, experiences and common predictors
This study analyzes the link between household savings and adverse financial experiences as well as financial expectations. Using data from the 2019 OeNB Euro Survey, we focus our analysis on Central, Eastern and Southeastern European (CESEE) economies. Managing perceptions of the past and expectations about the future may be particularly crucial in countries where people have repeatedly experienced macroeconomic crises. Besides controlling for a rich set of individual characteristics in a standard regression framework, we also use a double LASSO regression analysis to test if detected effects are confounded by omitted variables. While people’s expectations about the economic situation in their country are positively related to the extensive margin of having savings and saving regularly, inflation expectations are negatively related to the amount people save regularly. Crisis experiences matter less but having experienced restricted access to one’s bank account discourages savings in general. Crisis experiences become more relevant if we restrict our analysis to older respondents and to savings during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, for which we have some data. The LASSO approach mostly supports our findings but also shows that neither crisis experiences nor expectations about economic or inflation developments are relevant predictors of the propensity to save regularly. It reveals, however, that trust in the national central bank is, among other things, a relevant predictor of savings behavior.
Euro adoption in CESEE: How do financial literacy and trust in institutions affect people’s attitudes?
We investigate how financial literacy and trust in institutions affect attitudes (expectations and preferences) regarding euro adoption in ten countries of Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe (CESEE). Using recent evidence from the OeNB Euro Survey, we show that attitudes on euro adoption vary widely across and within countries. In our country sample, on average, 18% of the surveyed individuals would prefer a faster accession to the euro area than they expect, while another 18% would prefer a later euro introduction than they expect. The share of those whose expectations match their preferences is 22% in the overall country sample. 19%, on average, do not expect or wish euro area accession to take place at all. Finally, 23% indicate that they have not formed attitudes on the introduction of the euro in their respective countries. Computing an overall index of attitudes toward euro adoption, we show that financially literate individuals are more likely to form definite expectations and preferences and tend to prefer euro adoption to take place earlier than they expect. We further show that trust has a similar impact on the overall attitude toward euro adoption – with both trust in national and European institutions having a positive and significant impact on forming more accurately
aligned expectations and preferences as well as on preferring the euro to be adopted sooner rather than later.
