This paper analyzes the effect of severance payments on the probability of separation at given tenure, wages and other individual and firm characteristics. It studies a mandatory deferred wage scheme of the Italian labour market (Trattamento di Fine Rapporto, TFR). Deferred wages increase job...

The intergenerational transmission of preference and attitudes has been less investigated in the literature than the intergenerational transmission of education and income. Using the Italian Time Use Survey (2002-2003) conducted by ISTAT, we analyse the intergenerational transmission of reading...

We use twenty years of Italian administrative panel data, a uniquely rich source of information on internal migration experiences, to identify the role of unobserved worker characteristics in the selection and returns to migrants. We propose and implement a novel iterative estimation method for...

This study explains the emergence of the Sicilian mafia in the XIX century as the product of the interaction between natural resource abundance and weak institutions. We advance the hypothesis that the mafia emerged after the collapse of the Bourbon Kingdom in a context characterized by a severe...

The general elections held in February 2013 marked an earthquake in Italian politics. The two coalitions on the center-left and center-right that had governed Italy alternately between 1996 and 2011 together lost 11 million votes compared to the 2008 elections. The explanations advanced for this...

This paper empirically investigates complementarities between different sources of research funding with regard to academic publishing. We find for a sample of UK engineering academics that competitive funding is associated with an increase in ex-post publications but that industry funding...

A seller dynamically sells a divisible good to a buyer. It is common knowledge that there are gains from trade and that the gains per unit are decreasing. Payoffs are interdependent as in Akerlof's market for lemons. The seller is informed about the good's quality. The buyer makes an offer in...

Household portfolios include risky bonds, beyond stocks, and respond to permanent labour income shocks. This paper brings these features into a life-cycle setting, and shows that optimal stock investment is constant or increasing in age before retirement for realistic parameter combinations. The...

We solve a mean-variance optimisation problem of a defined contribution pension scheme in the accumulation phase. The financial market consists of: (i) the risk-free asset, (ii) a risky asset following a GBM, and (iii) a bond driven by a stochastic interest rate following the Vasicek [1977]...

Traditionally quantitative models that have studied households' port- folio choice have focused exclusively on the different risk properties of alternative financial assets. In the present paper we take a different ap- proach and assume that assets also differ in their liquidity. We construct a...