This paper explores the statistical properties of household consumption-expenditure budget shares distributions (HBSDs) - defined as the share of household total expenditure spent for purchasing a specific category of commodities - for a large sample of Italian households in the period...

In this paper we explore the statistical properties of the distributions of consumption expenditures for a large sample of Italian households in the period 1989-2004. Goodness-of-fit tests show that household aggregate (and age-conditioned) consumption distributions are not log-normal. Rather,...

This work, which shall contribute to the Fest "A Just Society: Honouring Joseph Stiglitz", discusses a major unifying theme in Joe Stiglitz monumental work, namely, the analysis of economies characterised by persistent learning and coordination hurdles. In his analysis Joe is in many respects a...

This paper investigates opinion dynamics and social influence in directed communication networks. We study the theoretical properties of a boundedly rational model of opinion formation in which individuals aggregate the information they receive from their neighbors by using weights that are a...

Firms grow and decline by relatively lumpy jumps which cannot be accounted by the cumulation of small, "atom-less", independent shocks. Rather "big" episodes of expansion and contraction are relatively frequent. More technically, this is revealed by fat tail distributions of growth rates. This...

We consider a market economy where two rational agents are able to learn the distribution of future events. In this context, we study whether moving away from the standard Bayesian belief updating, in the sense of under-reaction to some degree to new information, may be strategically convenient...

This paper studies market selection in an Arrow-Debreu economy with complete markets where agents learn over misspecified models. Under model misspecification, standard Bayesian learning loses its formal justification and biased learning processes may provide a selection advantage. However,...