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...

This paper analyzes the determinants of Italian households� participation in the debt market, considering both demand and supply effects and using the Bank of Italy�s Survey of Household Income and Wealth. The probability of debt is positively influenced by age (until 35 years), which...

This paper proposes a test for the cost-based explanation of non-participation, by estimating a lower bound to the forgone gains of incomplete portfolios; these are in turn a lower bound to the costs that could rationalize non-participation in financial markets: high bounds would imply...

We empirically investigate the relevance of demand-side complementarity between electronic and traditional provision of banking services. Since no systematic data on prices for the two types of services is available, it is not possible to estimate cross-elasticities of demand. We resort to two...

We use detailed data on housing prices in Italy available for a large number of years and with a fine geographical breakdown to compute capital gains and losses on the most widespread asset among consumers, housing, and inquire whether changes in housing values affect consumption. We find that...

Regulation and contract enforcement may be important determinants of the development of the household loan market, as much as they are of the supply of corporate loans on which the literature has focused. This paper draws on the Italian experience to provide evidence that formal and informal...

This study investigates inflation perceptions in both qualitative and quantitative terms and their relationship with factors likely to affect them. This has been done in a unified framework through a survey of a representative sample of Italian consumers carried out at the end of 2006. The...

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

Following the introduction of euro banknotes and coins many Italians perceived a much sharper increase in the price level than the moderate rise registered by the National Institute of Statistics. The paper shows that the apparent contradiction between the public�s perceptions and...

The act of choosing can influence maximizing behaviour for at least two distinct reasons: 1) process significance and 2) decisional inescapability. The constructive programme of the paper is combined with critical appraisal of the implications of these concerns for rational decisions about...