In 2000 Italy replaced its traditional system of severance pay for public employees with a new system. Under the old regime, severance pay was proportional to the final salary before retirement; under the new regime it is proportional to lifetime earnings. This reform entails substantial losses...

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...

In 2000 Italy replaced its traditional system of severance pay for public employees with a new system. Under the old regime, severance pay was proportional to the final salary before retirement; under the new regime it is proportional to lifetime earnings. This reform entails substantial losses...

Using new panel data from a representative survey of households in the six largest euro area economies, the paper estimates the impact of the Covid-19 crisis on consumption. The panel provides, each month, household-specific indicators of the concern about finances due to Covid-19 from the first...

In the early 1950s Modigliani, with Brumberg and Ando, formulated the life-cycletheory of consumption and savings that enjoyed a huge and undisputed success. But, since the early 1980s, the life-cycle theory has increasingly come under attack. One reason is the existence of an important...

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...

Data from the 2009 Internet Survey of the Health and Retirement Study show that many U.S. households experienced large capital losses in housing and financial wealth, and that 5% of respondents lost their job during the Great Recession. As a consequence of these shocks, many households reduced...

In the early 1950s Modigliani, with Brumberg and Ando, formulated the life-cycletheory of consumption and savings that enjoyed a huge and undisputed success. But, since the early 1980s, the life-cycle theory has increasingly come under attack. One reason is the existence of an important...

We estimate Euler equations for a number of countries and find that the excess sensitivity of consumption to current income fluctuations is higher in the countries where consumers borrow less. The low level of consumer debt in these countries can be interpreted either as a symptom of tighter...

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 a first step, we study the empirical transition matrix of consumption using a panel drawn from the Bank of Italy...