We elicit the intertemporal Marginal Propensity to Consume (iMPC) based on hypothetical different size lottery winnings through questions in the 2023-24 Italian Survey of Consumer Expectations (ISCE). Survey respondents were asked to allocate three hypothetical lottery winning amounts (€1,000,...

Using detailed micro-data, this paper documents that households with lower income risk (and higher income levels) exhibit a higher Marginal Propensity to Consume (MPC) in response to transitory income shocks, all else being equal. This finding is particularly significant among unconstrained...

We study the role of heterogeneity in the revenues of individual firms for euro area macroeconomic dynamics. To this end, we specify two models: a standard aggregate vector autoregressive model (VAR) and an "heterogeneous VAR" (HVAR). The VAR model includes only aggregate data, while the HVAR...

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 present an intertemporal consumption model of consumer investment in financial literacy. Consumers benefit from such investment because their stock of financial literacy allows them to increase the returns on their wealth. Since literacy depreciates over time and has a cost in terms of...

The 1993 Survey of Household Income and Wealth, a representative survey of the Italian population covering 24,000 individuals, reports detailed information on children attendance of public and private schools and parents? self-assessment of the quality of public schools in the city of residence....

The paper documents lack of awareness of financial assets in the 1995 and 1998 Bank of Italy Surveys of Household Income and Wealth. It then explores the determinants of awareness, and finds that the probability that survey respondents are aware of stocks, mutual funds and investment accounts is...

The theory of intertemporal consumption choice makes sharp predictions about the evolution of the entire distribution of household consumption, not just about its conditional mean. In the paper, we study the empirical transition matrix of consumption using a panel drawn from the Bank of Italy...

We estimate the effect of pension reforms on households' expectations of retirement outcomes and private wealth accumulation decisions exploiting a decade of intense Italian pension reforms as a source of exogenous variation in expected pension wealth. The Survey of Household Income and Wealth,...

Recent models with liquidity constraints and impatience emphasize that consumers use savings to buffer income fluctuations. When wealth is below an optimal target, consumers try to increase their buffer stock of wealth by saving more. When it is above target, they increase consumption. This...