Business investment is a very important variable for short- and medium-term economic analysis, but it is volatile and difficult to predict. Qualitative business survey data are widely used to provide indicators of economic activity ahead of the publication of official data. Traditional...

Economic convergence at the sub-national level could have spatially explicit manifestations reflecting convergence clubs and other forms of geographical clustering that are not captured by an overall inequality measure. By decomposing the Theil index of per capita income inequality into between...

In a choice model of risky assets the role of risk aversion is analyzed. The measure of risk preference comes from a direct subjective survey question and it is considered as an imperfect information about the true risk attitude of investors. Misclassification between the true and the observed...

The sample estimates are uniformly below those of the Financial Accounts, even after harmonising all the definitions and the evaluation criteria. Such a problem can stem from the interviewee�s unwillingness to disclose the actual value of the asset (under-reporting). The paper presents a...

This paper aims to describe non-respondents in the Bank of Italy�s Survey of Household Income and Wealth (SHIW) and to measure the underestimation of income and wealth attributable to non-response. The evidence confirms that non-response is not random, since it is more frequent among...

This paper examines the relationship between inequality and happiness through the lens of heterogeneous values, beliefs and inclinations. Drawing upon opinion data from the European Social Survey for twenty-three countries, we find that individual views on a wide range of themes can be...

The paper compares income inequality of households and individuals. Obviously, the latter is greater than the former; in fact households operate a broad redistribution of resources both between earners and non earners (children, unemployed, housewives), and between earners of unequal income....

Information from the Survey of Italian Household Income and Wealth (SHIW) is not normally used as a basis for regional estimates on account of the small sample size. This paper presents an experimental estimation of regional aggregates for the period 1995-2000, obtained by combining several...

This paper describes the composition and distribution of household wealth in Italy. First, the evolution of household portfolios over the last forty years is described on the basis of newly reconstructed aggregate balance sheets. Second, the characteristics and quality of the main statistical...

This paper is aimed at evaluating the incidence of measurement error on the main variables collected in the Bank of Italy�s Survey of Household Income and Wealth (SHIW). The results are especially relevant to researchers using the data for economic analysis, since they need to take data...