This paper carries out an investigation into the socio-economic determinants of couples’ childbearing decisions in Italy. Since having children is in most cases a “couple matter”, the analysis accounts for the characteristics of both the possible parents. Our results do not support...

We study the problem of an investor that buys an equity stake in an entrepreneurial venture, under the assumption that the former cannot monitor the latter’s operations. The dynamics implied by the optimal incentive scheme is rich and quite different from that induced by other models of...

This paper explores the impact of risky asset holdings by U.S. nonfinancial firms. From the early 1990s to 2017, the share of risky securities surged from 28% to over 40% of firms' financial assets. Using a business-cycle heterogeneous firms model, I show that declining real interest rates since...