This paper examines the extent to which tax and benefit policy changes introduced in the period 2001-11 had a poverty- or inequality-reducing effect. We assess whether the period was indeed a “missed opportunity” for policy changes to make a difference to poverty reduction since the Lisbon...

It is widely recognized that childcare has important pedagogical, economic and social effects on both children and parents. This paper is the first attempt to estimate a joint structural model of labour supply and childcare decision applied to Italy. Such an approach is particularly informative...

The concept of social investment has gained ground on the EU-level, manifested among other things in the launching of the ‘Social investment package’ by the EU Commission in 2013 and subsequent engagement in the follow up of that initiative. In this context, the Nordic experience has no...

The paper aims to analyze the determinants of the individual choice of con- tributing to pension funds, particularly by focusing on individual preferences towards the annuitization of the accumulated pension capital. The analysis is performed in the light of the latest reform of social security...

In a simple stochastic overlapping generation model, individuals work when young and retire when old, generations’ productivity is affected by a serially uncorrelated random shock, and fiat money and nominal public debt are the only storable assets. In this setting, we show that social...

The design of fully funded pension plans is affected by governance and incentive problems, as underlined by the experience of several countries. The analytic perspective of contract theory allows to detect the nature of such problems: pension-fund managers have strong incentives to manipulate...

The hedging of weather risks has become extremely relevant in recent years, promoting the diffusion of weather derivative contracts. The pricing of such contracts require the development of appropriate models for the prediction of the underlying weather variables. Within this framework, we...

The modelling of wind speed is a traditional topic in meteorological research, where the main interest is on the short-term forecast of wind speed intensity and direction. More recently, this theme has received some interest in the quantitative finance literature for its relationship with...

Contrary to the common wisdom that asset prices are barely possible to forecast, we show that high and low prices of equity shares are largely predictable. We propose to model them using a simple implementation of a fractional vector autoregressive model with error correction (FVECM). This model...

In the last 15 years, several Multivariate GARCH (MGARCH) models have appeared in the literature. Some recent research has begun to examine MGARCH specifications in terms of their out-of-sample forecasting performance. In this paper, we provide an empirical comparison of a set of models, namely...