This paper aims at detecting whether Italian households exhibit excess sensitivity in their consumption with regard to “severance pay”, a sizable, expected lump sum that workers receive at either retirement or whenever they leave their job for whatever reason. One of the implications of the...

According to economic theory, elderly homeowners should be much more eager than they actually are to adopt financial instruments allowing them to borrow against home equity. This paper investigates the determinants of interest for the Italian elderly in one such instrument, the reverse mortgage....

We examine whether Italian household consumption exhibits excess sensitivity to "severance pay", a sizable lump-sum that workers receive at job termination. We find no evidence of excess sensitivity of non-durable expenditure to this anticipated cash-in-hand change.

We use a Cox-type model to investigate the role of the family as an informal market: parents enjoy their children’s proximity (a proxy for the informal care they can receive from their kids) and “reward” them with an anticipated wealth transfer. Children appreciate the reward, particularly...

In this paper we study the effect on Italian households’ saving behaviour of a change in real estate wealth using the Bank of Italy’s Survey of Household Income and Wealth (SHIW) dataset. We relate annual household saving to capital gains in housing, controlling for other characteristics...