We use data from the 2009 Internet Survey of the Health and Retirement Study to examine the consumption impact of wealth shocks and unemployment during the Great Recession in the US. We find that many households experienced large capital losses in housing and in their financial portfolios, and...

We study the relation between cognitive ability and the decision to invest in stocks using the recent Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE). The survey has detailed data on wealth and portfolio composition of individuals aged 50+ in 11 European countries and three indicators...

We argue that health care quality has an important impact on economic inequality and on saving behaviour. We exploit district-wide variability in health care quality provided by the Italian universal public health system to identify the effect of quality on income inequality, health inequality...

This paper provides the first joint analysis of household stockholding participation, location among stockholding modes, and participation spillovers. Our model matches observed participation, conditional and unconditional, and asset location patterns. We find that financial sophistication...

We document and study international differences in both ownership and holdings of stocks, private businesses, homes, and mortgages among households aged fifty or more in thirteen countries, using new and comparable survey data. We employ counterfactual techniques to decompose observed...

We use life history data covering households in thirteen European countries to analyse residential moves past age 50. We observe four types of moves: renting to owning, owning to renting, trading up or trading down for home-owners. We find that in the younger group (aged 50-64) trading up and...

In this paper we present empirical evidence of the importance of aggregation bias in Euler equations for consumption. The main result is that estimates of the elasticity of intertemporal substitution for consumption are consistently lower for aggregate data than for average cohort data. In...

This paper investigates the causes of the Italian consumption bust of the early 1990s by estimating deviations from 'normal' consumption using household level data for 1985-94. The data set used is a particularly rich, but as yet unexplored, source recently released by ISTAT. It contains...

In this Paper we analyse unique data on credit applications received by the leading provider of consumer credit in Italy (Findomestic). The data set covers a five year period (1995-99) during which the consumer credit market rapidly expanded in Italy and a new law came into force that set a...

In this Paper we argue that standard tests of portfolio efficiency are biased because they neglect the existence of illiquid wealth. In the case of household portfolios, the most important illiquid asset is housing: if housing stock adjustments are costly and therefore infrequent, we show how...