We explore the impact of mortgage securitization on the international diversification of macroeconomic risk. By making mortgage-related risks internationally tradeable, securitization contributes considerably to better international consumption risk sharing: we find that countries with the most...

We use Italian micro data to investigate how consumers reacted to the Great Recession. In particular, we study the age profiles of non-durable consumption, durable purchases and wealth over the 2008-2012 period for different year-of-birth cohorts, and how they departed from the way they would...