Using the Bank of Italy's Survey of Households Income and Wealth (SHIW) covering a 5-year panel, we measure the impact of the degree of households' financial literacy on the quota of housing investment in their portfolio. We find that households with higher levels of financial literacy hold a...

This article examines the extent to which early childhood socioeconomic differences emerge in hyperactivity, impulsivity and persistence, all of which are psychometric analogues to how economists conceptualise time discounting. We control for a wide range of factors including parental investment...

We explore intertemporal decision making to test the extent to which elicited discount rates and a self-reported scale of impatience measure the same behavioral characteristic. We conduct experiments in which we elicit discount rates using monetary rewards and a self-reported measure of...

The paper formulates the fertility choice of a representative working woman in the context of a two-period OLG model. The starting point is a young working woman faced with the dilemma of having to simultaneous rear children and participate in the labor force. Discrete variable equivalents of...

Since Thaler (1981), we have lived with the uncomfortable stylized fact that many humans choose strictly dominated actions in intertemporal choice experiments. We designed an experiment to probe the reasons for the apparently suboptimal behavior, and we find that the classic Fisher (1930)...

<p>In this paper we investigate the size of the consumption drop at retirement in Italy. We use micro data on food and total non-durable household spending covering the period 1993-2004, and evaluate the change in consumption that accompanies retirement by exploiting the exogenous variability in...</p>

Most intertemporal studies of risk are based on the constant relative risk aversion utility function. This has the property that the intertemporal elasticity of substitution and the coefficient of relative risk aversion are both consstant and inverses of each other. With the diversity of...

In the present paper, an optimal growth model for which transformation possibilities are supposed to be bounded in the short run and unbounded in the long run - maybe due to adjustment costs or accummulation costs - is considered. It is shown that equilibria exist and that equilibrium...

In this paper, we study the intertemporal equilibria of an infinite-lived representative agent model with public debt. We show that for a given path of government expenditures, there generally exist a continuum of equilibria depending on various debt policies.

This paper develops a dynamic model wherein production generates pollution that is viewed as a public bad by consumers. There are two types of consumers : those who are altuist a la Barro-Becker and leave bequests to their children and those who are pure life-cyclers. Both types of consumers...