Financial Responsibility, Personality Traits and Financial Decision ...

striking are the low scores that we find for some of these questions even for those who
labeled themselves as savers. For instance, only 51.06 percent of savers have in fact
earned more than they spent. Only 33.75 percent of savers have saved enough to last
a year without income. These levels are still low, when considering that earning more
than spending is a condition to even save at all. In section B of table 3, we construct
a savings score based on this set of four questions. This shows that 9.89 percent of self
reported savers in fact did not earn more than they spend, they did not save enough to
last a year, nor did they save for retirement, nor read their pension statement. Their
savings score equals zero, which makes it difficult to understand why they consider
themselves as savers in the first place. The natural conclusion is that they believe
the government is saving on their behalf as a society for their futures in the form of
retirement provision and social security. When accumulating scores 3 and 4, we find
that 39.04 percent of the savers group actually score high, compared to the 33.67 percent
of spenders and 35.49 percent for the total sample. In the remainder of our analysis we
will distinguish between self-reported savers, based on how respondents consider their
own ability, versus observed savers, based on this 35.49 percent that actually scores
high on our four saving behavior questions.
Table 4— Logit regressions on self-reported savers
To understand which factors trigger the knowledge and use of saving behavior across
our set of respondents we run stepwise Logit regressions. First, we analyze the self-
reported saving perception (understanding), in which savers is a binary dummy with
value one if respondents have indicated to be very willing to sacrifice immediate well-
being to achieve future success. We explain the variation in this dummy variable using
an extended model, in which we first include a set of demographics, which we then
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