We solve the dynamic occupational choice problem of a finitelylived, borrowing constrained household which faces exogenously given stochastic wages and business returns. Entrepreneurship means investing personal wealth into a risky asset and neither receiving wage income nor paying social...

This paper studies the growth and efficiency effects of pay-as-you-go financed social security when human capital is the engine of growth. Employing a variant of the Lucas (1988) model with overlapping generations, it is shown that a properly designed unfunded social security system leads to...

Using a representative sample of Italian investors, we estimate the risk associated with pension benefits by eliciting for each individual the subjective distribution of the replacement rate as a summary indicator of social security wealth. We find substantial heterogeneity of pension risk and...

We estimate the portfolio effect of changes in social security wealth exploiting a decade of Italian pension reforms as a source of exogenous variation. The Italian Survey of Household Income and Wealth records detailed portfolio data and elicits expectations of retirement outcomes, thus...

We show that in business groups with efficient internal capital markets both winner-picking and cross-subsidization may occur. Depending on the amount of internal resources, a group may either exit a market in response to increased competition, or rather channel funds to the subsidiary operating...

This paper studies the optimal fiscal treatment of addictive goods (cigarettes, drugs, fatty foods, alcohol, gambling etc.). It shows that, when agents have private information about their productivity levels and their degree of rationality, the Atkinson and Stiglitz result of optimal uniform...

This paper studies if external commitment devices are effectively capable of helping agents to reduce their consumption of addictive goods (alcohol, cigarettes, drugs, fatty foods etc.). The main assumption introduced in the model is that individuals are sophisticated hyperbolic discounters. The...

Strotz (1956) first suggested that individuals are more impatient when making short-run tradeoffs than long-run ones. Many experimental studies supports his conjecture. Motivated by recent evidence from the British Department of Work and Pension (2006), this paper applies this behavioral...

This paper investigates the interaction between legal institutions and financial arrangements and the effects that these have on corporate decisions and aggregate activity, both theoretically and empirically. In the theoretical part, we develop a two country general equilibrium model with...

We investigate the determinants of firms’ implicit employment and wage insurance to employees against industry-level and idiosyncratic shocks. We rely on differences between family and non-family firms to identify the supply of insurance, and between national public insurance programs to gauge...