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1. Introduction
Over the past two decades, there has been an increasing interest in financial planning and retirement preparedness (e.g. Bucher-Koenen and Lusardi, 2011; Crawford and O'Dea, 2020; Hershey and Mowen, 2000; Leandro-França et al., 2016; Lusardi and Mitchell, 2007; Shim et al., 2012). In this line of research, retirement preparedness refers to an individual's planning, saving and/or investing for retirement to maintain financial independence, wealth and/or well-being when individuals leave the workforce. Retirement preparedness has become increasingly relevant due to the fact that individuals have been asked to take on more responsibility for their retirement and financial well-being (Alessie et al., 2011; Van Rooij et al., 2012) and that many of them are not adequately prepared for this stage of their life (Adams and Rau, 2011). For instance, as cited in Adams and Rau, the 2009 retirement confidence survey (see Helman et al., 2009) shows that only 13% of survey participants indicate that they are very confident about having enough money to have comfortable life after their retirement. Given this retirement preparedness literature, our study focuses on explaining retirement saving intention which we consider as the extent to which individuals likely to engage in future-oriented retirement saving behaviors (Croy et al., 2010; Shim et al., 2012). Retirement saving intention has been argued and found to be an important antecedent of (actual) retirement saving and planning behaviors (Bongini and Cucinelli, 2019; Hoffmann and Plotkina, 2020).
Past research has already shown that financial literacy explains individual's intention and/or ability to save for retirement (e.g. Adams and Rau, 2011; Bucher-Koenen and Lusardi, 2011; Hastings and Mitchell, 2020; Hauff et al., 2020; Lusardi and Mitchell, 2007; Van Rooij et al., 2012). According to Servon and Kaestner (2008, p. 273), financial literacy refers to “a person's ability to understand and make use of financial concepts”. Financial literacy has been assessed in both objective and subjective ways. That is, a number of researchers measure financial literacy by using quiz of financial knowledge questions (i.e. objective or actual financial literacy; Lusardi et al., 2010; Rothwell et al., 2016; Van Rooij et al., 2012). Others assess financial literacy by asking individuals to rate their own understanding as well as confidence...