What are the effects of austerity on distributional policy? We exploit the autonomy of Italian municipalities in setting non-linear income taxes and the exogenous introduction of a fiscal rule to show that austerity increases income tax progressivity. Consistent with this evidence, we find that...

We study the role of household saving behaviour, of individual motives for saving and that of perceived liquidity constraints in 15 Euro Area countries. The empirical analysis is based on the Household Finance and Consumption Survey, a new harmonized data set collecting detailed information on...

Recent contributions have shown that it is possible to account for the so-called consumptionreal exchange anomaly in models with goods market frictions where international asset trade is limited to a riskless bond. In this paper, we consider a more realistic international asset market structure...