Theory suggests that people facing higher uninsurable background risk buy more insurance against other risks that are insurable. This proposition is supported by Italian cross-sectional data. Its shown that the probability of purchasing casualty insurance increases with earnings uncertainty.

The 1991 Italian Survey of Household Income and Wealth contains detailed retrospective information on major bequests and gifts received by each member of the household. This information is used to estimate the share of intergenerational transfers in total welath and to relate this share to...

We investigate the role of information spillovers (IS) in determining firms' labor adjustments. We test the proposition that information on relevant state variables spills over through one firm's decision th those of other firms, assuming that spillovers matter only among frims that are both...

Theoretical models of investment under uncertainty predict that the sign and the strength of the investment -uncertaintyrelationship is in principle ambiguous and can vary greatly across groups of firms depending on the degree of irreversibility of investment and the market power of the firm....

We survey the existing work on the cross-country differences in the transmission of European monetary policy. We find that prior work, focusing on macroeconomic data, does not clearly answer the question posed in the title and offer some explanations for the ambiguity.