Using a representative sample of Italian investors, we estimate the risk associated with pension benefits by eliciting for each individual the subjective distribution of the replacement rate as a summary indicator of social security wealth. We find substantial heterogeneity of pension risk and...

This paper presents stylized facts on labor supply, income, consumption, wealth, and several measures of consumption and income inequality drawn from the 1980-2006 Survey of Household Income and Wealth (SHIW)conducted by the Bank of Italy. The SHIW provides information on consumption, income and...

We estimate the portfolio effect of changes in social security wealth exploiting a decade of Italian pension reforms as a source of exogenous variation. The Italian Survey of Household Income and Wealth records detailed portfolio data and elicits expectations of retirement outcomes, thus...

The extent to which consumers are aware of available financial assets depends on the incentives of asset suppliers to spread information about the instruments they issue. We propose a theoretical framework in which the amount of information disseminated and the probability of individuals...

The theory of intertemporal choice predicts that the cross-sectional variance of the marginal utility of consumption is equal to its own lag plus a constant and a random component. Using general preference specifications and some assumptions about the nature of the random component, we provide...

We examine the dynamics of wealth accumulation distribution in Italy using data drawn from the Survey of Household Income and Wealth, a representative sample of the Italian population conducted by the Bank of Italy. We compare survey data with national accounts data and discuss sample...

We investigate whether information sharing among banks has affected credit market performance in the transition countries of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, using a large sample of firm-level data. Our estimates show that information sharing is associated with improved availability...

This paper performs an efficiency analysis of households portfolios based on the comparison of observed portfolios with the mean-variance frontier of assets returns. Data on household portfolios are drawn from the 2001 Centro Einaudi survey, a representative sample of the Italian population with...

We explore the pattern of elderly homeownership using microeconomic surveys of 17 OECD countries. In most countries the survey is repeated over time, permitting construction of an international dataset of repeated cross-sectional data, merging 59 national household surveys on about 300,000...

The 1991 Italian Survey of Household Income and Wealth contains detailed information on how respondents acquired their main residence and any other real estate. This information is used to estimate the impact of inter vivos transfers on the saving period required to purchase a house and on the...