We study the effect on savings of an increase in the capital risk of the investment opportunities when the representative consumer is allowed to optimally choose her portfolio. Sandmo (1970) and Levhari and Srinivasan (1969) prove that individuals with high risk-aversion and time-separable,...

The low level of financial literacy in many countries suggests that households are at risk of sub-optimal financial decisions. In this paper we assess to what extent financial advisors can substitute for such a lack of knowledge, by analyzing the effect of investors’ financial literacy on...

According to economic theory, elderly homeowners should be much more eager than they actually are to adopt financial instruments allowing them to borrow against home equity. This paper investigates the determinants of interest for the Italian elderly in one such instrument, the reverse mortgage....

By requiring individuals to decide whether to participate in (newly established) pension funds, how much to contribute and how to invest their retirement wealth, pension reforms have raised concerns about the ability of households to deal with financial decisions. Using the Bank of Italy's...

The concept of “familiarity” has been used in financial economics to explain apparent paradoxes in people’s behavior, such as the home bias in portfolio choices. In this study, we investigate whether (lack of) familiarity with the language of investor communication may contribute to an...

A growing body of literature shows that nancial literacy aects household savings and investment choices. Less attention has, however, been devoted to its eect on debt behaviour. This paper contributes to lling this gap by considering how nancial literacy in uences household attitudes with...

Financial literacy has important implications for economic reforms. Reforms are meant to change people’s behavior and their effectiveness crucially depends on the ability of citizens to recognize and generally approve their necessity, their general design, and their “sense of direction.”...

This paper presents the results from a survey on the attitudes toward reverse mortgages of homeowners aged 45 and over in the Netherlands. We find that there is substantial potential interest in reverse mortgages, especially for the purpose of being able to live more comfortably and not worry...

In this paper we show how liquidity constraints shape Italian households' decisions with regard to supplying their labor. One way to neutralize binding liquidity constraints is by resorting to supplying additional labor, instead of reducing consumption patterns. We estimate whether this channel...

This paper uses new data available from a school census in Togo to analyze differences in primary school performances across regions. Our results, obtained from a stochastic frontier analysis, suggest that differences in efficiency explain only part of the observed variation, while resource...