The paper proposes a measure of countries' welfare based on individuals' lifetime utility and applies it to a large sample of countries in the period 1960-2000. Even though welfare inequality across countries appeared stable, the distribution dynamics points out the emergence of three clusters....

The relationship between the demographic structure and the saving rate of a society is the reflection of the aggregation of the behaviour of heterogeneous households, differing from one another in the type of living arrangements and in the characteristics of their members. In order to contribute...

The paper presents the main results of the Eurosystem�s Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS) with an emphasis on the data for Italy in the international context. The paper examines households� socio-demographic characteristics, assets and income distribution, participation...

The paper describes first the evolution in total household wealth in Italy over the period 1965-2010 before addressing the analysis of wealth inequality. On the basis of reconstructed data, we show that household wealth inequality declined until the beginning of the 1990s. It then grew...

In a choice model of risky assets the role of risk aversion is analyzed. The measure of risk preference comes from a direct subjective survey question and it is considered as an imperfect information about the true risk attitude of investors. Misclassification between the true and the observed...

The multidimensional view of well-being is receiving growing attention, both in academic research and policy-oriented analysis. This paper examines empirical strategies to measure poverty and inequality in multiple domains, concentrating on two problems in the use of synthetic multidimensional...

The paper describes the sample surveys on the personal distribution of incomes conducted in post-war Italy: the first survey carried out by Istituto Doxa in 1947-48; the sample survey of household income and wealth conducted by the Bank of Italy since the late 1960s; the expenditure survey, and...

This paper examines the relationship between inequality and happiness through the lens of heterogeneous values, beliefs and inclinations. Drawing upon opinion data from the European Social Survey for twenty-three countries, we find that individual views on a wide range of themes can be...

The paper provides an evaluation of the redistribution effects stemming from the changes to the personal income tax introduced in the last decade. The analysis confirms that between 1989 and 2001 the net average tax rate increased for all taxpayers and, above all, for one-earner couples. The...

In many VARs, monetary policy shocks are identified with the least squares residuals from a regression of the federal funds rate on an assortment of variables. Such regressions appear to be structurally fragile and are at odds with other evidence on the nature of the Fed's reaction function;...