We examine whether Italian household consumption exhibits excess sensitivity to "severance pay", a sizable lump-sum that workers receive at job termination. We find no evidence of excess sensitivity of non-durable expenditure to this anticipated cash-in-hand change.

This paper is centered on the complementary roles played by pension communication/information and financial literacy for a sustainable and equitable nonfinancial defined contribution (NDC) system at both the micro and macro socioeconomic level. The paper presents new evidence on: (i) the concern...

The low level of financial literacy across households suggests that they are at risk of making suboptimal financial decisions. In this paper, we analyze the effect of investors’ financial literacy on their decision to demand professional, non-independent advice. We find that non-independent...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to study the impact of the 2007 Italian severance payment reform on the cost and the access to credit for small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Design/methodology/approach – The authors study the implications of the reform adapting the theoretical...

This paper investigates the effect of potential competition on takeovers which we model as a bargaining game with alternating offers where calling an auction represents an outside option for each bidder at each stage of the game. The model describes a takeover process that is initiated by an...