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This master thesis aims to explore the relationship between financial literacy and probability of saving in private pension schemes in the Czech Republic among citizens older than 50 years. While the first part of this master thesis provides overview of pension systems among the OECD countries with emphasis on the Czech Republic, the second part brings the theoretical background for the financial literacy and for the measurements of financial literacy according to international studies. The last part of this master thesis serves as a practical part of this master thesis. In order to examine the relationship between financial literacy and saving for retirement, we performed a logistic regression. We set the probability of saving in a private pension scheme as a dependent variable and independent variables according to the studied literature. The last part of this master thesis also provides the summary of our conclusions about the importance of financial literacy within the decisions about saving for retirement and also the opinion that the lack of financial literacy was one of the main causes for unsuccessful pension reform in the Czech Republic where the second pillar was cancelled recently.

This paper focuses on the comparison of financial performance of the Czech voluntary private pension scheme with five other reformed private pension schemes in the region of Central Eastern Europe (Bulgaria, Croatia, Hungary, Poland and Slovak Republic). The current state and the recent development of the Czech private pension scheme are analyzed in the first part of the paper. In the main part of this work we construct the dataset of periodic scheme returns covering the last decade, and estimate the schemes Sharpe ratios (SR) for four reference benchmarks. The findings suggest that except for Poland none of the schemes managed to beat its long-term domestic benchmark (10-year government bonds) as the SRs estimates turn out to be negative. The highest underperformance was found in the case of the Czech Republic. Such poor results were assigned to the presence of restrictive annual minimum return guarantees and ineffective legislation arranging the PF costs allocation.

This thesis focuses on the comparison of financial performance of the Czech voluntary private pension scheme with five other reformed private pension schemes in the region of Central Eastern Europe (Bulgaria, Croatia, Hungary, Poland and Slovak Republic). The current state and the recent development of the Czech private pension scheme are analyzed in the first part of the thesis. In the main part of this work we construct the dataset of periodic scheme returns covering the last decade, and estimate the schemes Sharpe ratios (SR) for four reference benchmarks. To complement the analysis we also employ the Sharpe style analysis to evaluate the impact of managerial decisions of market selection/timing on the scheme returns. The findings suggest that except for Poland none of the schemes managed to beat its long- term domestic benchmark (10- year government bonds) as the SRs estimates turn out to be negative. The highest underperformance was found in the case of Czech Republic. The results of style analysis suggest a modest positive influence of the active managerial decisions on the scheme returns with respect to the passive investment strategies. JEL Classification G23, G28, O57, H55 Keywords: Private pension schemes, Czech voluntary pension scheme, financial performance, Sharpe ratio, Sharpe Style...