The aim of this paper is to provide further insights into the linkages between stock market development and economic growth. When it is not possible to distinguish between investment projects with different rates of return, market valuation of those projects is an “average value” reflecting...

In an overlapping generations economy households (lenders) fund risky investment projects of firms (borrowers) by drawing up loan contracts on the basis of asymmetric information. An optimal contract entails either the issue of only debt or the issue of both debt and equity according to whether...

This paper employs data on 119 countries for the period 1999/2000 to 2004/2005 to examine the impact of banking development on the size of shadow economies. The main results indicate that an improvement in the development of the banking sector is associated with a smaller shadow economy in a...

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...