PurposeThe Lifelines COVID-19 cohort was set up to assess the psychological and societal impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and investigate potential risk factors for COVID-19 within the Lifelines prospective population cohort.ParticipantsParticipants were recruited from the 140 000 eligible participants of Lifelines and the Lifelines NEXT birth cohort, who are all residents of the three northern provinces of the Netherlands. Participants filled out detailed questionnaires about their physical and mental health and experiences on a weekly basis starting in late March 2020, and the cohort consists of everyone who filled in at least one questionnaire in the first 8 weeks of the project.Findings to date>71 000 unique participants responded to the questionnaires at least once during the first 8 weeks, with >22 000 participants responding to seven questionnaires. Compiled questionnaire results are continuously updated and shared with the public through the Corona Barometer website. Early results included a clear signal that younger people living alone were experiencing greater levels of loneliness due to lockdown, and subsequent results showed the easing of anxiety as lockdown was eased in June 2020.Future plansQuestionnaires were sent on a (bi)weekly basis starting in March 2020 and on a monthly basis starting July 2020, with plans for new questionnaire rounds to continue through 2020 and early 2021. Questionnaire frequency can be increased again for subsequent waves of infections. Cohort data will be used to address how the COVID-19 pandemic developed in the northern provinces of the Netherlands, which environmental and genetic risk factors predict disease susceptibility and severity and the psychological and societal impacts of the crisis. Cohort data are linked to the extensive health, lifestyle and sociodemographic data held for these participants by Lifelines, a 30-year project that started in 2006, and to data about participants held in national databases.

This paper reviews the literature on saving behavior and portfolio choice after retirement and provides a descriptive analysis of this behavior by Dutch elderly households. Studying saving behavior in the Netherlands is informative because of the very different institutional background compared to the US, for which most of the empirical evidence is. In the Netherlands, the generous pension system and almost complete coverage of the public health-and long-term care insurance system makes precautionary saving less necessary. Using detailed administrative data, we present evidence on the extent to which the financial resources of retirees are affected by shocks such as the decease of a spouse or deteriorating health-similar to recent empirical studies by Poterba et al. ( 2014) for the US. Moreover, we examine the extent to which retirees who do not experience any shocks are able to keep positive wealth at their disposal and sustain their consumption level during retirement. Our results show that the death of the spouse results in a significant reduction of household wealth compared to surviving couples-which is also found in the USwhile health shocks result in higher household savings in old-age due to the almost complete coverage of health care expenditures. Although retirees in the Netherlands face limited uncertainty about health expenditures, our analysis shows that the elderly, on average, keep large amounts of assets even at a very old age. Our findings suggest that (1) the generous pension benefits are protective of household wealth, (2) illiquid housing wealth constrains the decumulation of household wealth, (3) bequests and transfers after the death of the first spouse are important.

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