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...

Prior research suggests that those who rely on intuition rather than effortful reasoning when making decisions are less averse to risk and ambiguity. The evidence is largely correlational, however, leaving open the question of the direction of causality. In this paper, we present experimental...

Over much of the past 25 years, the cycles of house price and consumption growth have been closely synchronised. Three main hypotheses for this co-movement have been proposed in the literature. First, that an increase in house prices raises households' wealth, particularly for those in a...

The adequacy of household saving for retirement has become a policy issue all around the world. The UK and US have been in the vanguard of those countries that have tried to encourage retirement saving by providing tax-favoured treatment for particular savings accounts. We consider empirical...

We study the socio-economic gradient of child development on a representative sample of low- and middle-income children aged 6-42 months in Bogota, using the Bayley Scales of Infant Development, a high quality test based on direct observation of the child's abilities. We find a statistically...

Following the 1994 financial crisis, the rate of saving of the Mexican economy fell from 21. 7 percent to 19. 8 percent of GDP. The decline was associated with a reduction in the rate of external saving from 6. 9 to 0. 5 percent between 1994 and 1995. The overall reduction was not more dramatic...

This paper constructs a general equilibrium overlapping generation model to evaluate quantitatively how demographic transition (falling mortality and fertility rates) affects aggregate variables (wages, interest rate, output), and inter-generational welfare in closed and open economies. We...

This paper presents evidence on the relationship between economic shocks to relative male wages and changes in household consumption in Mexico during the 1990s, which is a period characterized by high volatility. In addition to performing this type of analysis for Mexico for the first time, the...

East Asia and Latin America have diverged in several dimensions in the past three decades. This paper compares household saving behavior in two countries in each region (Mexico, Peru, Thailand and Taiwan). We make four contributions. First, we provide the first comparisons of savings in these...

In this paper, we estimate a collective model of household consumption and test the restrictions of collective rationality using z-conditional demands in the context of a large Conditional Cash Transfer programme in rural Mexico. We show that the model is able to explain the impacts the...