Expectations and riskiness of future earnings are crucial determinants of individuals' intertemporal choices. Yet, the empirical literature lacks reliable measures of the distribution of future income. Lacking direct observability, the latter is usually estimated inferring the mean, the variance...

The paper documents lack of awareness of financial assets in the 1995 and 1998 Bank of Italy Surveys of Household Income and Wealth. It then explores the determinants of awareness, and finds that the probability that survey respondents are aware of stocks, mutual funds and investment accounts is...

Using survey data on Italian manufacturing firms, this paper examines firms' capital structure and their access to financial debt, notably bank loans. We find that the share of financial debt in total liabilities is, on average, smaller for small firms than for large ones. However, this is not...