The paper provides an econometric analysis of the aggregate saving function of Italian households in the vein of the life cycle theory. Results from an ECM representation based on yearly data for 1951-1998 point to depressive effects on private consumption of recent reforms of social security,...

Women�s labor force participation is lowest in Italy among the OECD countries. Moreover, the participation rate of married women is positively correlated with their husbands' income. We show that high tax rates together with tax credits and transfers raise the burden for two-earner...

The volume collects the essays presented at the 15th Workshop on Public Finance organised by Banca d'Italia in Perugia from 4 to 6 April 2013. The workshop focused on the link between fiscal policy and macroeconomic imbalances and comprised four sessions. The first session concentrated on the...

By allowing median voter�s location and preferred policy to change over time, a variety of redistributive policies results in the long-run with no unique relationship to inequality. Single outcome depends on the interaction between the pure economic structure and policy action in...

We consider a difference-in-differences setting with a continuous outcome, such as wages or expenditure. The standard practice is to take the logarithm of the outcome and then interpret the results as an approximation of the multiplicative treatment effect on the original outcome. We argue that...

The question addressed by this study is whether consumers remember past prices correctly. We test Italian citizens� memory for cinema prices with questionnaires distributed to moviegoers. The analysis concentrates on the memory of pre-euro prices, but the recall for a more recent period is...

This paper analyses the dynamics of Italian household wealth over the 1990s and assesses the strength of the wealth effects on consumption, using as a benchmark the United States. In a period of sharply rising asset prices, Italian household net worth rose significantly, but on the whole...

This study investigates inflation perceptions in both qualitative and quantitative terms and their relationship with factors likely to affect them. This has been done in a unified framework through a survey of a representative sample of Italian consumers carried out at the end of 2006. The...

In this paper we use two complementary Italian data sources (the 1995 Istat and Bank of Italy household surveys) to generate household-specific non-durable expenditure in the Bank of Italy sample that contains relatively high-quality income data. We show that food expenditure data are of...

Following the introduction of euro banknotes and coins many Italians perceived a much sharper increase in the price level than the moderate rise registered by the National Institute of Statistics. The paper shows that the apparent contradiction between the public�s perceptions and...