The last decade has seen significant increases in consumer indebtedness in western countries, causing concern about its economic and social impact. In particular, over-indebtedness is attracting attention from national and international authorities because of its potential effect on both the...

In the Survey of Household Income and Wealth (SHIW) conducted by the Bank of Italy, the flow variables (income and consumption) refer to the year preceding the interview while the stock variables (household composition and net wealth) refer to the end of the year. However, there are some...

The purpose of this paper is to examine the measures of over-indebtedness proposed in the literature and to apply them to the Italian case from 2008 to 2014 by using the wide array of information available from the Bank of Italy's survey on households. The numerous measures of over-indebtedness...

This paper explores the role of cash usage in feeding the underground economy by using a unique dataset that combines, at province level, official estimates of Italian firms’ underreporting with data on cash transactions drawn from the aggregate anti-money laundering reports filed to the...