In 2011, Italian businesses and households have faced the Sovereign debt crisis, but savings confirmed its resilience. Since the beginning of the crisis, Italian households’ propensity to save has fallen nearly 1.8 percentage points, although Italy continues to rank above most other...

The continuing statements about the fall in the households’ propensity to save are not based on a deep analysis of the causes, and in particular the tax burden increase, low interest rates, lower protection offered to the workforce. An economic policy aimed to protect savings and to promote...

The paper deals with the problem of defining money in a system with derivatives. We conclude that derivatives have to be included in the definition of money, and support our conclusions with an econometric test on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and Chicago Board of Trade indexes. We focus on...

Financial derivatives are products whose price is linked with that of an underlying asset. The relationship between these two prices has been studied in depth, and the following conclusions have been reached: (1) the volatility of underlying asset's price decreases after the introduction of...