This paper quantifies the welfare effects of the aggregate house price collapse during the U.S. Great Recession for leveraged and un-leveraged U.S. households. We calibrate a dynamic general equilibrium model to the U.S. economy and simulate the 2007-2009 Great Recession as a contemporaneous...

This paper studies how access to bank lending differed between family and non-family firms in the 2007-2009 financial crisis. The theoretical prediction is that family block-holders’ incentive structure results in lower agency conflict in the borrower-lender relationship. Using highly detailed...

The life-cycle hypothesis posits that saving is positive for young households and negative for the retired, so that wealth should be hump-shaped. Yet, if one looks at the microeconomic evidence on saving by age, dissaving by the elderly is limited or absent. But the saving measures usually...

We use data from the 2009 Internet Survey of the Health and Retirement Study to examine the consumption impact of wealth shocks and unemployment during the Great Recession in the US. We find that many households experienced large capital losses in housing and in their financial portfolios, and...

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...

This paper introduces time inconsistent preferences into a moral hazard setting where the agent is risk-averse. We derive a necessary optimality condition on the consumption allocation that is different from the so-called Inverse Euler Equation of Rogerson (1985). Specifically, inverse marginal...

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...

In 2000 Italy replaced its traditional system of severance pay for public employees with a new system. Under the old regime, severance pay was proportional to the final salary before retirement; under the new regime it is proportional to lifetime earnings. This reform entails substantial losses...

Using life-history survey data from eleven European countries, we investigate whether childhood conditions, such as socioeconomic status, cognitive abilities and health problems influence portfolio choice and risk attitudes later in life. After controlling for the corresponding conditions in...

We use responses to survey questions in the 2010 Italian Survey of Household Income and Wealth that ask consumers how much of an unexpected transitory income change they would consume. We find that the marginal propensity to consume (MPC) is 48 percent on average, and that there is substantial...