There is much confusion in the economics literature on wage determination and the employment–inflation trade-off. Few model builders pay as much careful attention to the definition and meaning of long-run concepts as did Albert Ando. Expanding on years of painstaking work by Ando, the...

This paper tests the impact of firms’ ownership structure on firms’ innovation decisions using a rich dataset of about 20,000 Italian manufacturers. After accounting for its possible endogeneity, we find that ownership concentration negatively affects the probability of innovation,...

This paper builds a unifying framework based on the theory of intertemporal consumption choices that brings together the limited participation-based explanation of the Consumption Capital Asset Pricing Model's poor empirical performance and the transaction costs‐based explanation of incomplete...

This article proposes a test for the cost-based explanation of nonparticipation, by estimating a lower bound to the forgone gains of incomplete portfolios; these are in turn a lower bound to the costs that could rationalize nonparticipation in financial markets: high bounds would imply...

Most classical tests of constant relative risk aversion (CRRA) based on individual portfolio composition use cross sectional data. Such tests must assume that the distributions of wealth and preferences are independent. We use panel data to analyze how individuals’ portfolio allocation between...

This paper estimates the determinants of households’ choice between fixed rate (FRM) and adjustable rate mortgage (ARM) contracts, using the Bank of Italy’s Survey of Household Income and Wealth. Contrary to the predictions of the theoretical literature, the analysis shows that most...

We use household survey data to construct a direct measure of absolute risk aversion based on the maximum price a consumer is willing to pay for a risky security. We relate this measure to consumer's endowments and attributes and to measures of background risk and liquidity constraints. We find...

This paper analyses the dynamics of Italian household wealth over the 1990s and assesses the strength of the wealth effects on consumption, using as a benchmark the United States. In a period of sharply rising asset prices, Italian household net worth rose significantly, but on the whole...

We use household survey data to construct a direct measure of absolute risk aversion based on the maximum price a consumer is willing to pay to buy a risky asset. We relate this measure to a set of consumers� decisions that in theory should vary with attitude towards risk. We find that...