Financial Responsibility, Personality Traits and Financial Decision ...

Table 1— Summary statistics (n=1,721)
Section A shows that the 54.17 percent of our respondents is male, and that the average
respondent is 57 years of age, lives in a household of 2.40 persons, has 0.62 children and
earns 1845 Euros net of tax every month. Besides the age structure, these characteristics
coincide strongly with the averages for the Dutch society at large. DHS respondents
are older than the average person in the Netherlands, since the panel was constructed
in the early 80s and has gradually aged ever since. Here, we also find that spenders are
slightly older than the sample average, while savers earn the highest net income.
Figure 1— Self reported savers (n=1,721)
To briefly highlight some of the demographics of the self reported savers versus spenders,
we plot the fraction of savers in our sample across age, gender, household size, and
income groups in figure 2. This illustrates the results of section A of table 1 and shows
that men do not consider themselves as significantly greater savers than women, but
this tendency does increases with age, household size and income.
In section B of table 1, we find that the majority of our respondents were born
in the era after the second world war; that 25.83 percent of respondents were born
into a family that was better off than average; that 53.75 percent received pocket
money from their parents at the age of twelve; and that 21.26 percent had parents
that saved for their education. These statistics vary across savers and spenders. We
find more savers from younger generations, and we find that these savers were more
often born into families that were better off than average, with parents that saved
more often for their education, and that were more likely to hand out pocket money,
when compared to spenders. Section C shows that after youth 39.40 percent of our
respondents enjoyed some college education. 27.14 percent of our respondents claim to
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