Why do people have kids in developed societies? We propose an empirical test of two alternative theories — children as “consumption” vs. “investment” good. We use as a natural experiment the Italian pension reforms of the 90s that introduced a clear discontinuity in the treatment...

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...

The 1991 Italian Survey of Household Income and Wealth contains detailed information on how respondents acquired their main residence and any other real estate. This information is used to estimate the impact of inter vivos transfers on the saving period required to purchase a house and on the...

A familiar result in the theory of private intergenerational transfers is that competitive equilibria with gifts from children to their parents are dynamically inefficient whereas they are dynamically efficient with bequests from parents to their children. This note demonstrates that if growth...

In this paper the principle of gratuitousness and its relationships with other principles which motivate behaviour, such as those inspired by reciprocity, is analyzed. The basic premise is that gratuitousness is a feature acquired by an action by virtue of the intentions that inspire the action...

Using micro data from eleven European countries, we investigate the impact of being socially active on cognition in older age. Cognitive abilities are measured through scores on numeracy, fluency and recall tests. We address the endogeneity of social activities through panel data and...

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...