This paper analyzes the relation between the quality of the legal enforcement of loan contracts and the allocation of credit to households, both theoretically and empirically. We use a model of household credit market with secured debt contracts, where the judicial system affects the cost...

This paper investigates the interaction between legal institutions and financial arrangements and the effects that these have on corporate decisions and aggregate activity, both theoretically and empirically. In the theoretical part, we develop a two country general equilibrium model with...

The paper investigates optimal financial contracts when investment in pledgeable assets is endogenous and not observable to financiers. In a setting with uncertainty, two inputs with different collateral value and investment unobservability, we show that a firm-bank secured credit contract is...

The paper proposes a model of collateralized bank and trade credit. Firms use a two-input technology. Assuming that the supplier is better able to extract value from existing assets and has an information advantage over other creditors, the paper derives a series of predictions. (1) Financially...

This paper analyses the effect of the degree of the legal enforcement of credit contracts on the level of private investment. We use a model of corporate finance with moral hazard and collateralized asset. We introduce in the model a third agent: the government, which is responsible for the...

We estimate a forward looking New Keynesian Phillips Curve (NKPC) for the U.S. using data from the Survey of Professional Forecasters as proxy for expected inflation. We find that the NKPC captures inflation dynamics well, independent from whether output or unit labor costs are used as a measure...

Several papers have documented that US consumers can not fully insure themselves against all their idiosyncratic risks, but little is understood about which mechanisms provide insurance. We investigate whether, as some suggest, progressive taxes provide additional insurance. The methodology...

Using a representative sample of Italian investors, we estimate the risk associated with pension benefits by eliciting for each individual the subjective distribution of the replacement rate as a summary indicator of social security wealth. We find substantial heterogeneity of pension risk and...

We measure the return to education by accounting for differences in wage and unemployment risk confronted by individuals with different levels of education. When markets are incomplete, risk-averse individuals value jobs to which less income risk is associated. In this case a measure of the...