We provide evidence that the quality of health care affects health outcomes, exploiting the substantial variability in the quality of the Italian public health service. The data are drawn from the 2001 Survey of Health, Aging and Wealth (SHAW), a joint venture of the Universities of Padua,...

We test the validity of three models of intertemporal consumption choice (the permanent income hypothesis, the myopic model, and the consumption insurance model) by means of mobility indexes for the underlying consumption distribution. Each of the three models delivers different transition laws...

Data revisions and the availability of a longer sample offer the opportunity to reconsider the empirical findings that suggest that in the OECD countries national saving responds non-monotonically to fiscal policy. The paper confirms that the circumstance most likely to give rise to a...

We use two data sets, one from a large brokerage and another from a major bank, to ask: (i) whether financial advisors tend to be matched with poorer, uninformed investors or with richer, experienced but presumably busy investors; (ii) how advised accounts actually perform relative to...

We test for precautionary saving and excess sensitivity of consumption to predicted income growth using a 1989-93 panel survey of Italian households that has measures of subjective income and inflation expectations. These expectations provide a powerful instrument for predicting income growth....

In this paper we focus on poor financial literacy as one potential factor explaining lack of portfolio diversification. We use the 2007 Unicredit Customers' Survey, which has indicators of portfolio choice, financial literacy and many demographic characteristics of investors. We first propose...

The 1993 Survey of Household Income and Wealth, a large cross-section of the Italian population covering 24,000 individuals, reports detailed information on children’s attendance of public and private schools and parents’ assessments of the quality of public schools in the city of residence....

We estimate Euler equations for a number of countries and find that the excess sensitivity of consumption to current income fluctuations is higher in the countries where consumers borrow less. The low level of consumer debt in these countries can be interpreted either as a symptom of tighter...

Previous tests for liquidity constraints using consumption Euler equations have frequently used asset-based sample separation rules, arguing that low wealth consumers are more likely to be constrained. We propose an alternative sample separation rule using direct information on borrowing...

In this paper we provide an explanation for three features that characterize the Italian savings rate: by international standards, Italy is a `high-saving' country; the Italian savings rate has declined markedly in the last three decades; the correlation between saving and growth is stronger in...