Complete Markets in Italy: An Analysis on Micro Data

This paper tests the hypothesis of complete markets in a panel of Italian households drawn from the Bank of Italy’s Survey of Household Income and Wealth (SHIW). Under the hypothesis that markets are complete and preferences are of the CRRA type, consumption growth is equated across households, and thus it is independent of idiosyncratic variables. I use the difference between realized income and its subjective expectation as the household’s idiosyncratic shock, allowing for non-separability between consumption and leisure. Other possible measures for the personal shock are proposed in order to obtain more robust results. For all the proposed specifications the test strongly rejects the null hypothesis of complete markets.