Was the increase in income inequality in the US due to permanent shocks or merely to anincrease in the variance of transitory shocks? The implications for consumption and welfaredepend crucially on the answer to this question. We use CEX repeated cross-section data onconsumption and income to...

A Discrete Choice Experiment (DCE) in the health-care sector is used to test the lossaversion theory that is derived from reference-dependent preferences: The absolutesubjective value of a deviation from a reference point is generally greater when the deviationrepresents a loss than when the...

This paper investigates whether self-employed households use consumer loans – inparticular instalment loans and overdrafts – to finance business activities. Controlling forfinancial and non-financial household variables we show that self-employed householdsparticularly use personal...

In the standard neoclassical model consumers use all the available information and the demand for goods depends exclusively on preferences and prices whereas other spurious information do not play any role. In the market for books, we investigate if – in contrast to the standard model – the...

The availability of child-care services has often been advocated as one of the instruments to counter the fertility decline observed in many high-income countries. In the recent past large inflows of low-skilled migrants have substantially increased the supply of child-care services. In this...

We study how the political cost of enforcing a lockdown in response to the COVID- 19 outbreak relates to citizens' propensity for altruistic punishment in Italy, the early epicenter of the pandemic. Approval for the government's management of the crisis decreases with the amount of the penalties...

Standard consumption utility is linked in time to a consumption event, whereas the timing of prosocial utility flows is ambiguous. Prosocial utility may depend on the actual utility consequences for others – it is consequence-dated – or it may be related to the act of giving and is thus...

We use information on monthly wage increases set by collective agreements in Italy and exploit their variation across sectors and over time in order to examine how household consumption responds to different types of positive income shocks (regular tranches versus lump-sum payments). Focusing on...

Providing electricity to the unconnected 1.1 billion people in developing countries is one of the top political priorities of the international community, yet the costs of reaching this objective are very high. The present paper examines whether the objective and the associated costs are...

We study the impact of expert reviews on the demand for HIV treatments. A novel feature of our study is that we observe two reviews for each HIV drug and focus attention on consumer responses when experts disagree. Reviews are provided by both a doctor and an activist in the HIV lifestyle...