This paper exploits an Italian microeconomic data set to study retirement behaviour of women and men using survival analysis techniques. After a brief introduction to the Italian pension system and to the Bank of Italy survey, different specifications of a Cox proportional hazard model are...

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the retirement decision in the United Kingdom. We distinguish four retirement routes: retirement, unemployment, long-term sickness and other states. The focus of the paper is the impact of pension benefits on retirement transitions. We estimate...

This paper reviews the progress made in the literature toward defining and measuring the affordability of utilities. It highlights the relative merits of alternate affordability metrics; the practical challenges to their operationalization, including the underlying data requirements; and their...

In this paper, we use two complementary Italian data sources (the 1995 ISTAT and Bank of Italy household surveys) to generate householdspecific nondurable expenditure in the Bank of Italy sample that contains relatively high-quality income data. We show that food expenditure data are of...

This paper reports a 3-phase experiment on a stylized labor market. In the first two phases, agents face simple games, which we use to estimate subjects’ social and reciprocity concerns, together with their beliefs. In the last phase, four principals, who face four teams of two agents, compete...

We develop a model of optimal asset allocation based on a utility framework. This applies to a more general context than the classical mean-variance paradigm since it can also account for the presence of constraints in the portfolio composition. Using this approach, we study the distribution of...

We investigate households' portfolio choice using a microeconometric approach derived from mean-variance optimization. We assume that households have heterogeneous expectations on the distribution of excess returns and that they can't take short positions in the risky assets. Assuming two such...

We derive from a sample of US households the distribution of the risk aversion implicit in their portfolio choice. Our estimate minimizes the distance between the certainty equivalent return generated with observed portfolios and portfolios that are optimal in a mean-variance framework. Taking...

In this paper we investigate the way consumption changes around retirement in Italy. Using micro data covering the 1985-96 period, we find that consumption age patterns are similar to those found in the US and other developed countries, despite the much more wide-spread cohabitation of different...

In this paper, we analyse some distributional effects of the reforms to water and energy services in Italy. We first document the new regulation setting in these services, illustrating the dynamics of utility prices and of household expenditure in the period 1998-2005. We then propose a way to...