Applying the variance decomposition developed by Asdrubali et al. (1996), the paper explores for the first time the role and the extent of smoothing channels at a micro level using a sample of UK households. Our empirical analysis of British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) data concludes that the...

On BHPS data we measure various indices of social capital at the individual and household level, and use them as explanatory variables in standard consumption insurance tests. We find that two out of three aspects of social capital positively impact on consumption smoothing, by reducing the...

We show that recent methodological advances in econometric theory raise questions about the results obtained by some influential contributions on the determinants of international investment patterns, since the seminal paper by Lane and Milesi Ferretti (2008) (LMF). In most such contributions,...

We investigate the determinants of University-Industry (U-I) interactions in the biopharmaceuticals in Italy over the period 2004-2010, choosing co-publishing as a proxy of U-I partnerships. We construct a novel dataset of co-published articles, that contains measures of proximities,...

By using data from nine waves of the IMF Coordinated Portfolio Investment Survey, we explore the determinants of bilateral portfolio investments and their dynamics. The main goal of our analysis is that of understanding whether a diversifi cation motive can be found, among the various...

The main research question of this paper is whether or not the risk of family disruption has an impact on the consumption/saving decisions of households. Although little empirical work exists in this area, often presenting indirect evidence, the theory is divided over the effect of family risk...

We investigate the relationship between macroeconomic news and sovereign spreads in the euro area at weekly frequency. Our focus lies in the role played by macroeconomic announcements. To this aim we augment a standard GARCH model with a synthetic measure for macroeconomic surprises obtained by...