Using a survey of clients from one of the largest Italian banks, we find that investors with low level of trust in professional advisors seek financial counselling, but make their decisions autonomously. We investigate whether these investors exert some form of control over the quality of the...

Using the Bank of Italy's Survey of Households Income and Wealth (SHIW) covering a 5-years panel, we measure the impact of the degree of households' financial literacy on the quota of housing investment in their portfolio. We find that households with higher levels of financial literacy hold a...

A growing body of literature shows that financial literacy affects household savings and investment choices. Less attention has, however, been devoted to its effect on debt behavior. This paper contributes to filling this gap by considering how financial literacy influences household attitudes...

By requiring individuals to decide whether to participate in (newly established) pension funds, how much to contribute and how to invest their retirement wealth, pension reforms have raised concerns about the ability of households to deal with financial decisions. Using the Bank of Italy's...

The concept of familiarity has been used in finance theory to explain apparent paradoxes in people's behavior, such as the home bias in portfolio choices. This study investigates whether (lack of) familiarity with the language of financial consumers may contribute to an explanation of the...

We investigate whether lack of familiarity may contribute to an explanation of the gender gap in stock market participation and risk taking. We use ads in widely read women magazines to select companies that we assume to be more familiar to women than to men, and construct a “pink”...